I have found two old macbooks in the house me and my family live in. They are a MacBookair 2011 and a MacBook pro from 2008. I don’t want to throw them away cause they are usable. I daily drive another 2013 MacBook air, very small and great for what I do with it, Wich I’m still looking to put Linux on it. For the 2011 MacBookair I put MX in it and I’m pretty good with it(but I want to use it as backup for the 2013), but with the 2008 MacBook pro there Is a problem: there is no battery to be found and it works only connected to power. Since here there are kinda frequent power outages for a minute or so I still can’t use it for something that requires it running all the time. Do you have any suggestions on what to do with it or any distro? (For the 2013, 2011and 2008)
Sorry for the trouble
Have a great day (and I hope this is relevant to the community)
I highly recommend EndeavourOS for old MacBooks.
I have a 2008 iMac, 2015 iMac, 2012 MacBook Pro, 2016 MacBook Pro, 2013 MacBook Air, 2017 MacBook Air, and 2020 MacBook Air all running EOS (last one uses a special kernel because of the T2 chip).
They all run flawlessly including the Broadcom WiFi. The Arch kernel is the only one I have found where these drivers work well and EOS sets them up automatically during install.
CachyOS is also an option but the video is wonky on my older MacBooks. EOS is flawless.
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I have 4 Apple laptops running Linux, so I have some experience with it all.
The Macbook Air 2011 has wifi driver bugs, on large downloads/updates you will experience crashes (complete lockups). This happens with either of the two drivers available for it (foss linux and broadcomm). I suggest you get a tiny usb wifi for it for $6. You blacklist the internal driver first.
For the 2008 macbook, consider if it has 4 gb of ram or not. If yes, use linux, if not, have it as a toy. Maybe install something Q4OS (with trinity DE), or even Haiku. I personally don’t use Linux on less than 4 GB of RAM. Yes, it loads fine on lite distros, but the moment you want to do some web browsing, you’ll hit the swap, which destroys the drive. 4 GB RAM is my minimum. Also, the fact that it doesn’t have EFI, it will work best with Q4OS (which is Debian based), and Haiku.
For the 2013 one, I’d suggest Linux Mint, it works great. You might, or might not require a usb wifi too. On some newer macbooks the wifi works without crashes during usage, but it doesn’t let the machine wake up properly you see. So all that stuff need to be tested by you.
On the 2015+ macbooks, the webcam doesn’t work usually (the third party driver doesn’t work properly either).
I use EndeavourOS on Mac hardware for very similar years.
Wifi (Broadcom-wl on the older stuff and brcmfmac_wcc on the newest) works well on all of them.
Webcams work well on all of them as well. Most are just USB cams but some use the FaceTimeHD module that builds with DKMS but works very well for me.
I cannot remember if I had to install the FaceTimeHD driver or if it was auto-installed by EOS. Even if not, it is in the repos and one line to install the package.
On the 2013 one i already had tried mint in live and it works good. the 2008 one has 2 sticks of ddr2 1gb (2gb total). i have two sticks of ddr3 of 2gb(4gb total) but i dont know if it will work, i think not but mabye trying. yeah btw i can use it as like retro games and lite distros just for the fun. Btw thank you very much ;)
