Those generations of MacBook Airs were just unbelievably amazing laptops for the time. They were lighter and more portable than anything else, but still had plenty of ports and functionality (even the old beloved magnet-based power cables). It was the first non-Thinkpad laptop that I enjoyed using. This post is going to make me dust off an old 2013 Air I have kicking around and see if I can fix a broke space bar and get it running Linux.
Had the same maxed out i7 11” air. I replaced it with a 2018 13” (the second model of the following generation) which was only faster when it wasn’t thermal throttling… which was its general disposition. Those 2010-2015 era Airs were great laptops for their time.
>Those 2010-2015 era Airs were great laptops for their time.
Can concur. Back then Apple didn't go for thinness for the sake of thinness like the post 2015 machines did. And it's not like the 2010's generations of machines were think and bulky.
I have that same laptop (2012 air). It still works fine and my son uses it daily. It's a great little machine apart from the battery life, which is pretty awful by modern standards (~5 hours of light use, give or take) even after replacing the battery.
A lot of that generation of Airs have failing batts - my MBP from that era was part of the recall for catching fire, and mine caught fire, but apple refused to replace it due to, after having the machine for two MONTHS to investigate - they determined that one of the moisture sensors was set off, and thus they wouldnt honor the recall for the battery literally catching fire.
iFixit.com has a great guide to replacing the battery on those units, and will sell you a new one for $70. Could be a great project for you and your son, too!
It has to be one of the longest-lasting laptop designs ever. The first-gen MBAs were a little different, but from 2010 to 2022 there was almost no change to the basic design (they finally gave it up with the M2 one). Screens got better, ports went Thunderbolt-y, but the look and feel essentially never changed.
I can't think of a laptop design that's been this static for this long. _Maybe_ the more conventional Thinkpad designs?
In 2018 (and continuing in 2019) they switched to the butterfly keyboard (named that because after a while the keys mature and fly away from the keyboard).
The late 2012 unibody retina Macbook Pros were truly unstoppable. I have replaced the battery in mine 6 times and it travelled the world with a photojournalist for the first 4 years of its life. Still running strong w/ Ubuntu.
The first gen was also kinda terrible because SSDs were not standard on those. But the 2010s were and it really made it shine. I got a 2012 one and said "Ok I get it now".
The 2018 line kept the same aesthetic, but it was a completely new design. Thinkpads have been far more slowly evolving than the big break between the second and third Macbook Air chassis.
My MacBook Air 11-inch from 2015 with (1.7 GHz Dual-Core Intel i7; 8 GB of RAM) is still my main computer. And I love it, and it feels new.
It's 8 years old, and it doesn't show them. Not even a bit. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I made minimal maintenance and I use it everyday for hours. 8 years of daily use. I traveled to super remote places with it.
I want to use it for 2 or 3 more years (10 years in total would be nice!)
This. People forget that those old macs were so long lasting because the disks were easily swappable with newer and faster SSDs so they could be upgraded and kept along for longer.
With the M* chips this lifehack will no longer be possible. Once the SSD storage fails, the entire motherboard is instant e-waste.
I think the 2015 generation of Macbooks will outlive the M1 generation from a HW pov. I still see people rocking the old Macbooks with the glowing Apple logo. I doubt the M series will see such longevity.
I think especially the base 256GB models will be much more impacted by drive wear and failures. It's too early to tell but I'm calling it now for the near future.
Maybe you'd like to demonstrate the ease of implementing Linux on M2 hardware. Where's that hardware driver source code? Oh, you're having to literally reverse engineer hardware? lol
That's not hostile, that's indifferent. Hostile would be if Apple implemented intentional blocks and safeguards attempting to prevent people from running Linux on M2. From everything I've read about it, it has been the exact opposite.
But they didn't provide any documentation, you are correct, so I wouldn't call it friendly or supportive. But I definitely wouldn't call it hostile either.
Looks like moving towards openness to me, because as far as I remember, there has not been such a high-functioning Linux distro on a Mac until Asahi. And implemented in such a short period of time, on top of that. Of course I wouldn't attribute it solely to that, the Asahi team seems to be doing a phenomenal job as well.
Also, I haven't seen Linus Torvalds use a Macbook (an M2 Air running Asahi Linux) until recently either.[0]
Huh, Ubuntu works perfectly on my 2010 Macbook pro. Including fringey stuff like keyboard backlight control and the ambient light sensor. Also sleep etc.
I didn't even have to mess with anything, it just worked right after the install. How much more high-functioning can you get?
100% towards openness. Before the move to ARM, Macs' security standing was an all or nothing affair. Either all the OSes that ran on the Mac had a secure boot sequence, or none of them did.
With Apple Silicon, you can keep a complete chain of trust with macOS and install an insecure Linux distro. It's great security compartmentalization, and no x64 chip can offer this granular control.
A fair point though it was downvoted because HN is biased in favor of Apple. It's better to avoid any discussion concerning Apple products here, it just doesn't have the quality that other topics usually have.
I think part of the love for those models is how hobbled the successors to these laptops were. First the line basically stopped improving while the Macbook Pro went Retina, second there was the expensive Macbook no qualifier with a dreadful butterfly keyboard, and then the 2018 Macbook Air came out but still had a dreadful butterfly keyboard. Only in March 2020 did a proper, no compromise, better in every way laptop came out to replace a Macbook Air bought in 2012-2015.
True, I have an i7-8GB-256 MacBook Air. Haswell has been very efficient when it came out, and is holding up well until today. I gave the laptop to the partner of my sister who’s using it daily with the latest macOS Ventura, Using OpenCore Legacy Patcher
My little 11" MacBook Air (2015) was such an amazing computer. I'm a bit sad that I sold it, but at that point, I couldn't afford to buy a new computer without selling my old one, and I did get a decent price for it.
I've got the Zenbook S13 OLED and it's gorgeous. While the trackpad isn't as good as the one on the MacBook, it's close. And that aside, I prefer everything else about the Zenbook.
I have a Vivobook S 14X. It heats more than I'd like and Intel Iris (GPU) is super weak but otherwise would be a fine laptop. MacBook would probably be better on performance/battery but the proprietary OS is a big no for me.
My favourite laptop of all time is Macbook Pro mid-2015, with Debian GNU/Linux. It works flawlessly and almost out of box, SSD can still be easily replaced, and the screen is amazing.
Because it removes a thunderbolt port which I could use, whereas I don't need an HDMI port. In the ~18 months I've had it, I've used the HDMI port a grand total of 0 times.
The hardware is a joy to use, i used several years a macair 2011 snd now upgraded to a macair 2015 with ubuntu. Only had ti fix the wifi. Such a nice machine. Looking forward to get my hands on an M1 when they start to be old :D
The M1 Macbook Air is such a good machine, even several years after its introduction. So nice, in fact, that the M2 version really isn't all that enticing.
The M1 MBP is the best machine I’ve ever owned. Fast, ridiculous battery life, etc. I can use it all day without worrying about plugging it in. I actually built a Linux workstation with 16 cores and a state of the art 12th gen Intel chip etc and on a core-for-core performance, the M1 is actually a little faster.
How easy is it to keep a version of MacOS alongside? How long could I expect a new battery to last on a charge? I was thinking of buying a new MacBook M1 but I can’t afford the crazy price, and it’s been a nightmare to manage the OS updates.
Super easy, just need to install rEFInd (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/) . Some OS upgrades might hide partitions again but you can make it persist trough updates with a script. ALL hhe info is on the page.
You can also hold down the Option key when booting to select bootable partitions or external devices. Different models may require extra steps to enable this, but I've never needed to use rEFInd.
Re: battery; don't know for a new battery, but my original lasts 4-5 hours running linux - which is very good (IMO) given that it was bought at the start of 2016.
Don't know about having a MacOS alongside but if the disk is small, you might not want that anyway. And I presume you could always go back to MacOS later.
I recently tried a dual-boot configuration with my iMac 27" with both macOS and Ubuntu and after a short while the boot system got messed up. Couldn't fix it.
I read this is also an experience many Windows users have had when setting up dual booting systems with Linux.
At this point I think it's generally a bad idea to setup a dual-boot system with Linux, better to use it exclusively.
It's not the "with Linux" but that's the bad idea though, is it? It seems this is an area where Microsoft (I don't know about Apple) are getting away with anticompetitive practice in the guise of security.
I wonder what happen, in my experience updates sometimes make that OS take over booting from each other, you should check rEFInd and the info on the website. He is the guy dealing with this
Hm, I disagree. I have two desktops that I dualboot with windows 10 and various linux distros, currently ubuntu lts. If you install windows first then linux, it should work ok.
There are battery replacements, but some are sub-par and won't hold as much charge as they report. I returned a battery I bought from Amazon and bought another from a Duracell license holder, it worked better.
Be careful of planned obsolescence in the apple world, it sadly applies to their computers too. A MacBook from 2013-2015 almost certainly can't be upgraded to the latest Mac OS releases and stopped getting security updates long ago. IMHO just go full Linux on it.
But if you do need to dual boot I remember doing it a few times and the refind bootloader was very nice: https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
Using OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1] older Macs can run newer versions of MacOS that no longer officially support the hardware.
I'm running MacOS Ventura on a Macbook Air 2013 and Macbook Pro 2015 with it. They work reasonably well and get patch updates via official updates when released.
Note that some firmware upgrades will only be applied if MacOS is booted from the internal drive (NVME support was added this way to some models). I leave MacOS on the machine for as long as it's supported and dual boot other operating systems from external devices. Some can run completely in RAM if there's room, which is nice.
When the model is no longer supported with MacOS updates, I wipe the disk and install Linux. Sometimes I'll keep a copy of MacOS on an external drive if I need to access or troubleshoot specific features of that model (like digital optical audio before support matured on Linux).
I just recently pulled an old one of these out with linux mint installed because I needed a device that uppon receiving power boots up and plays a video loop — my usual goto raspi3 for some damned reason would not negotiate EDIDs above VGA resolution with the projector in use.
I booted the MBP after not having had it on power 4 years and it worked flawlessly. It then took maybe 20 minutes to run vlc on boot and set the propper bits to make it boot automatically when it receives power.
I cannot recall when things worked this flawlessly the last time
The MacBook Pro 2015 (13 and 15) are amazing, but they have glued-in batteries. iFixIt says it would take 45min to 2h to replace, and it is rated "Difficult". It's the only reason why I won't buy them on eBay.
So Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on “good” trackpads and most things are fixed with software? But hardware is the arguments they make for their Apple purchases!
Top menu with reasonable use of available space rather than the half-assed attempt to appeal to a hypothetical normie user on a 2014 tablet/netbook that gnome is doing
Touchpad driver that isn't outright physically painful to use
Progress in assistive technologies, font rendering, display technology and resolution rather than shipping hardly readable traditional Linux-style dark-blue on black terminal themes on today's dark default themes coupled with a lack of easy configuration
Actually working power management, and actual power efficiency resulting in 10h running times (despite overreaching stuff such as systemd, the developer of which has now left for MS to feast on INIs)
Focus on end user functionality rather than endless new developer improvements and abstraction frameworks for self-inflicted problems (snap/flatpack/Docker and other meta containers rather than fixing ld.so and glibc or just use static linking) when new apps aren't coming anyways
A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release
State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds
I would add Keybindings that are the same in all apps. Also, Having Command / Super as the keybinding key is awesome because it opens Control for the Readline / Emacs keybindings and doesn't end up in insane shortcut situations like every linux terminal where "copy" suddenly transforms from CTRL+C to CTRL+Shift+C.
MacOS has by far the best idea and implementation of how desktop keybindings should work (and no, I love vim but having desktop-wide vim keybindings doesn't make sense because not every input field can easily be modal). I'm constantly surprised why no linux distribution has copied this.
FYI: You can enable them in Gnome with Gnome-Tweaks. Apparently a very recent version of Gnome dropped this functionality for reasons that are beyond my understanding (but that's often the case when I look at the decisions that the Gnome devs make).
However, getting the Control -> Command/Super thing to work is much trickier. The best way is to use this: https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail
However when I tried that, I ran into all kinds of weird behaviours all over the OS. Also, it doesn't work with Wayland.
Another option is https://kinto.sh . It worked perfectly for me out of the box on Pop OS, and with a few tweaks to shortcuts I’m pretty happy with the experience to the point where I can fairly seamlessly switch between computers and not be driven crazy by the shortcuts.
You can't mention Emacs keybindings and claim "keybindings are the same in all apps" when Apple's Emacs keybindings are not the same as Emacs proper. For example moving a word left is now Ctrl-Option B instead of M-B.
Most terminal emulators let you remap Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+V if you really want.
Sure, it's not the full Emacs keybindings. But the existing ones are still better than what Linux Desktops offer. Some of the missing ones can be added by updating the `DefaultKeyBinding.dict` [1]. So in comparison to Linux not only does it have better Emacs keybindings support, macOS also allows adding a ton of custom shortcuts per system - without having to install weird xmodmap daemons that mutate your keys (which you also can do on macOS).
An eye-opener for me on how useful all the configurability of Linux actually is has been looking into getting macOS-alike keyboard layouts and shortcut behavior on Linux. There's pretty high demand for it (lots and lots of posts all over the Web from people trying to figure out how to make it happen) and there are whole projects based around it, so I assume a fair amount of time has been spent trying to make it work, yet all the options I've found are janky as hell and fail to work under all kinds of common scenarios.
The more distance I get from using Linux as a daily-driver desktop OS, the more it looks like most of the benefits of its configurability and modularity are fairly superficial—especially in its GUI stack—while the harm it causes is deep.
> Most terminal emulators let you remap Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+V if you really want.
But that doesn’t really help does it? Because now you’ve made killing and backgrounding a process just as hard. What you need is an extra accelerator key, which is only available on expensive boutique keyboards and not available at all on laptop keyboards.
> Top menu with reasonable use of available space rather than the half-assed attempt to appeal to a hypothetical normie user on a 2014 tablet/netbook that gnome is doing
This (space efficiency, not necessarily the top menu bar) is the main thing that's keeping me away from Linux at this time. "Liberating" a Macbook Air feels like a great idea right until you have to do actual work on it, at which point, unless you're using the terminal, the screen will be largely empty space and huge widgets, with whatever text or image you're working on cramped between all those beautifully hand-crafted organic breathable widgets.
Edit: I'm not talking about window decorations being large, I'm talking about application widgets being large. You can fit like three macOS buttons in the space of a single Adwaita- or Breeze-themed button. See e.g. this SE thread for a comparison -- not with macOS, but basically the same problem: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/489533/how-to-get-a...
There are many desktops for Linux running the full gamut from large intrusive window dressing to nothing at all and all levels of efficiency in between.
This is actually the main reason I can't stand Big Sur and after - why is so much space wasted on touch interfaces if my Macbook has no touchscreen? The Quick Menu is the best/most frustrating example of this, but it's also apparent in the new widget design and settings app.
Pure no, from me. KDE feels much more natural to me now that I've settled in.
Have you tried https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 or any of the similar themes by that project? There's a bit of extra padding still but it's vastly more usable than the Adwaita default. (And of course you don't need to bother w/ the retro icon packs shown in the screenshot, the basic GTK+ theme is plenty enough.)
(The best UI with that kind of widget style today is arguably SerenityOS, but the repo I linked above tries to provide something similar for existing GTK+ apps.)
I have, I've actually written my own GTK theme years ago, before I gave up on it. B00merang Project's stuff is cool -- still way larger than it ought to be but indeed better -- but GTK theming is a raging dumpster fire.
Not just GTK themes but all of the tweaks and extensions that are apparently necessary to have a UI usable by an adult. Even then it's a moving target and some GNOME update will break random shit or remove some control. It's absolutely infuriating.
While I like the overall feeling of those themes for nostalgia reasons, they've got all sorts of quirks. E.g. toolbar icons aren't correctly aligned (you can see that in the screenshot, on the "forward" and "back" buttons in the left corner) -- both the horizontal and the vertical margins are wrong. It's not the authors' fault. I've poked at GTK's CSS before -- you can't make it work, not at the current abstraction level.
Also, for comparison, a Finder sidebar item is about half the height of the (unresizable) Nautilus sidebar item in the screenshot. Thank God for Thunar at least :-).
Ubuntu Unity still works. It's basically the Mac desktop but better.
You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM. A lot of them don't bother with window chrome or even have a status bar with a clock out of the box.
> You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM.
If you try to run the numbers on e.g. sway/i3, that barely makes a dent. Realistically, you can squeeze maybe 6-8px out of a sane window decoration before it gets impractical.
Meanwhile you can get like 10px of vertical space just by halving the vertical padding of a default Adwaita/Breeze button, and it's still larger than the equivalent macOS button which non-technical users can click just fine. Sane sizing on three stacked widgets saves more space than any tiling WM.
We can have nice things without going back to 1980s UI paradigms.
Then just don't use Adwaita/Breeze themes if that bothers you so much? And yes, it's tied to the theme. Ubuntu Unity's default "Ambiance" theme uses much less space. XFCE's default theme also uses less space. You can get themes like Chicago 95 for XFCE which also use less space.
Having visited the third circle of hell before, and having actually gone as far as writing my own theme before giving up the whole charade, I would rather avoid revisiting the fourth circle of hell that GTK theming is.
Edit: also, both Greybird and Ambiance are both really large compared to anything you get on other platforms. It's through no fault of their authors, GTK's layout rules break (or at least broke, I was on GTK 3.24 last I tried it) at low padding values, and it's extremely hard to keep alignment afloat on small widgets. I'm also not exactly young anymore, the text contrast in Greybird's unfocused windows is pretty awful, and fixing anything related to GTK's :backdrop attribute is a very long-winded affair.
No, it's not mostly a Gnome problem. The default KDE theme, Breeze, is equally tablet-quality, and unless you want to fiddle with old QtCurve (which is nowhere near as space-efficient as macOS anyway) you're largely stuck with Qt's Fusion, which is itself barely tolerable.
As for Gnome applications, it's not a Gnome problem, it's a GTK problem, that affects all GTK applications, regardless of what DE they run under, and all GTK-based DEs, like XFCE.
Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times. I'm all for efficient use of vertical space - I am one of those who still remove the top tab bar and use tree-style-tabs, but in practice I think there is a reason why most of the world allows the menu to follow the thing it is linked to.
Also note that these menus doesn't add up on other systems either. I only "waste" space for one menu line on my Linux or Windows applications too.
> snap/flatpack/Docker
Meanwhile on Mac I still have to use AppZapper.
> A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release
You are probably comparing to Gnome and Unity here I guess, not KDE 5 or Windows?
> State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds
This varies with job description I think. In my field one of the reasons why I still hesitate to get a Mac next month - despite its many advantages - is the fact that so many open source programs I use looked ugly on Mac last I checked and some weren't available at all. Meanwhile on Linux I can just ap-get them or in Windows I can apt-get them in WSL and run them, GUI and all inside Windows. That is kind of magic!
> Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times.
A top menu was reasonable for the original 9” Macintosh display of 512×342 pixels. (The original Macintosh could not even multi-task, and the visual components of the operating system were not designed for multiple programs at once.) The top menu was always close enough, and famously used Fitts’s law to its advantage. The NeXT system (17” display, 1120×832 pixels) realized that something even closer to the mouse pointer is wherever the mouse pointer happens to be right now, and added a right mouse button to the NeXT mouse; this button was completely dedicated to showing the menu, and was not used for “right-clicking” anything.
Everything up to macOS itself is top notch. Trackpad, keyboard, display, CPU - all best in class. What isn't best in class is good enough. macOS the desktop part... let's keep it polite and call it a matter of preference (it sucks)
Agreed. When I was using Apple laptops as daily drivers I always got the questions why I was replacing the OS with Linux. Fact of the matter was that (at least for me) it was a much stabler environment to work with, less crashing, less unexpected feature failures, etc.
Its funny how the reality distortion works for MacOS, people really look very incredulous when you tell them that Linux on Mac works better for you than MacOS on Mac :-)
I’m not sure when your experience dates to, or what kind of dev you were working, but I’ve had the exact opposite: on MacBooks for ~15 years, range of dev (full stack on a few stacks down to large footprint performance critical golang), VM’s etc. In all that time I can count the number of full on crashes (kernel panics) on healthy hardware on one hand. macOS has been supremely stable in my experience.
I always wonder what people are doing where their computer crashes all the time. I've been using Macs since the G4 days and have rarely had any crashes. But, the same is true for Windows for many years when I was a developer for Windows software. Linux is probably where I've had the most crashes b/c it lets you shoot yourself in the foot - which I did many times while learning linux in the 90s-00s.
People might look at you incredulously because their experience isn't mirroring yours. For instance, I honestly do not recall the last time macOS crashed on me. It does what I want it to do 99% of the time without getting in my way. But.. that's my experience. Linux on Mac might work better for YOU, don't presume that is the same for everyone else.
I run arch linux on my ancient macbook pro 2011. The reason I installed this flavor of linux was to disable a faulty gpu, and the guidance I found was using this distro. This mac has been my all-day-every-day workhorse ever since. And as for linux, with i3 window manager it is fantastic. It runs all the latest things I need for programming and it runs them fast. I almost never boot into mac at all anymore.
Best speakers in-class, consistently decent keyboard and touchpad (butterfly aside), consistently decent monitor/screen, consistent software design language, "It Just Works(tm)" convenience, social status symbol.
With the speakers, it’s the tuning, not the hardware that is great (though I will agree their tuning is the best). The rest related to hardware, every flagship also does it just as well, but a little different. Software, if you’re comparing to Windows then anything will win, but macOS/iOS is really hostile to users in other ways. Idgaf about “status symbol”.
Apple delivers the proprietary ports that deprecate all my yucky existing cables, the walled garden that drives up costs and stifles external innovation, the orthodox design choices that refuse to update in the face of UX concerns, and the tv remote controls so divorced from human reality it guarantees I won’t watch too much tv!
Trackpads like many peripherals are a combination of tightly coupled hardware, firmware, and software. If it were a simple issue, you'd think Microsoft and the Linux people would've fixed it by now.
> you'd think Microsoft and the Linux people would've fixed it by now
I wonder if Microsoft and Linux developers tend to use a mouse over a trackpad? If they don’t use a trackpad, it isn’t a pain point for them and thus not something that would get prioritized. Apple (on the other hand) has historically had horrible mice (pretty, but poor ergonomics) and solid developer laptops, so trackpads get used more. [1]
Regardless of the platform, if a developer feels a pain point, that particular issue will be dealt with sooner. If windows/Linux trackpad usability is “good enough”, it’s not going to be a high priority.
[1] source: me. I’ve used many Apple mice and loved the Magic Mouse, even with the strange charging port. That is until I started having carpal tunnel inflammation and switched to a trackpad and finally a more traditional mouse.
It may be a bit of a chicken & egg thing. All the people I've seen regularly using Windows laptops carry around a wireless mouse with them that gets used anytime they're using it for an extended period, presumably because the trackpad is so bad. That's going to mean MS' metrics say most people use a mouse, even when a trackpad is available, in which case why bother improving it?
That's what I used to do, when I was a Windows and Linux user, because the trackpad on PC laptops was intolerable to use for more than about one minute (and I could never get the hang of trackpoint).
Developed a habit, like checking that I had my keys and wallet, when taking my laptop anywhere. Grab the mouse, grab the power supply, throw them in the bag, because the trackpad was always nigh-unusable and the battery life was only good enough for hopping between outlets unless you had a (charged!) extra battery to carry along.
Took some time to break those habits after switching to Macbooks, where neither was necessary unless I'd be away from my desk more than a day. Unplug laptop, pick up, walk away, don't think about anything else. Go figure, a portable computer that lets you treat it like it's portable.
> Apple (on the other hand) has historically had horrible mice (pretty, but poor ergonomics) and solid developer laptops, so trackpads get used more.
If you have a Mac desktop and don't like the mouse (cause they always did suck), the natural replacement is a third-party mouse, not an external trackpad. I think Apple and its userbase have always been more laptop-oriented, though.
I have always wondered about this. I have never used a Macbook, but I haven't had any issues with the trackpad on Linux either - I flick my finger, point, tap to click, pinch to zoom, double finger to scroll etc. I'm always using laptops a couple generations behind, and it always worked, often out of the box.
Alongside the mouse comment, I also wonder if Linux people don't care about trackpad because many (most?) of us don't like using mouse / trackpads because we prefer using keyboards mostly.
I think I can make an argument that trying to do most things on a keyboard will result in faster workflows and less wrist strain, but to do so feels similar to the arguments I have about avoiding super-googlifying your life, preference for using communication solutions like Signal rather than captured applications like messenger or instagram, recommending libre software, etc. For whatever reasons, normies just wanna slide fingers on trackpad / upload their faces to companies / give up their software rights!
Maybe I'm off base but I really feel similarly about keyboard usage as I do to other "nerd shit" like above. The best argument I've ever heard for it though was from the World of Warcraft days: people who click their spells with their mouse, rather than using extensive keybindings (you have more than 9 spells so need to involve shift, ctrl, and start using the keys around wasd as well), you would simply never be as good as a keyboard user. We called mouse-users "clickers" as a derogatory term. I started as a clicker (like most kids I'm sure) and was so astounded by how much better I got at the game, and how much easier it was to play, when I got used to keyboard bindings for spells, that I started trying it in other software, like MS word and power point. "Clickers suck" was a trueism there too, and so from like age 13 on I've always been the kind of person to invest maybe 5 minutes to an hour learning a new software's keybindings and I think it's paid dividends.
For GNU/Linux I get it. A lot of gaps there are just cause those people aren't interested in certain things. For Windows, I'm actually surprised Microsoft and Dell/whoever haven't gotten together to make a decent trackpad.
The hardware's part of it. They use a big trackpad and they position it centrally, which a lot of manufacturers don't do. But of course a good bit of it is software, Hackintosh touchpads (when they worked) inherited most then-OS X features. I don't know anyone who ever suggested otherwise.
I’ve been using Macs almost exclusively since the 90s, through all of the ISA and OS transitions, and this is literally the first time I’ve ever heard that preference for Mac trackpads might have anything to do with hardware.
I've been running Linux exclusively for over a decade on MacBooks and other laptops (flagship models from ASUS, HP, Lenovo) and I can tell you for certain it's the hardware. There may also be differences due to software, but if so, they're things I don't care about. The major thing for me is that I generally can't press to click on the other trackpads without immediately noticing that I have to press noticeably harder in some areas (eg: near the top) to register the click. On the MacBooks, it's absolutely consistent across the entire trackpad. Literally no other manufacturer seems to be able to do this. I hate using touch "tap" because it messes with typing, and no matter how good the software implementation of "disable tap when typing" it sucks. Pressing the trackpad gently and feeling the click, is the only way for me to use a trackpad.
In case you're wondering, this is because on the MacBooks it's not physically depressing at all - it's detecting a push and then generating haptic feedback that feels like a click. I wonder why PC manufacturers can't do this - patents?
The haptic trackpads are a newer thing, though. I think introduced around 2013. Mac trackpads have been above the rest as far as I can remember, like 2000.
Yep patents, but there was some recentish news that another company found another way to imitate those mechanics, so it might just come to other manufacturers as well soon.
No no, it does. Apple has bought trackpad company — was it FingerWorks? — that developed special HIDs for medical purposes. These things are a combination of pickup and signal processing, therefore hw and sw, that provides many extra layers of data that will contribute. Basic tracking will work out of generally understood signals, but the nuance comes from those that only proprietary sw can render.
Really? I think it's more arguable that it's mostly/entirely software _today_, but there was a fairly long period where an Apple trackpad was a large glass thing whereas the average PC trackpad was a small thing made of soft plastic which didn't support multitouch at all. There clearly _was_ a major hardware gap, though I do think it's less clear there is today.
No matter how good a hardware is, it can be made sucky with bad software -- I honestly don't see how you came to the conclusion that it is fixed in software, that's just faulty logic on your side.
I can at least confirm that Ubuntu 22.10's out-of-the-box touchpad support is PERFECT on a 2008 Macbook Aluminum (Core 2 Duo / 8GB RAM / SSD). Exactly as you'd expect with macOS.
I was actually astounded at how better this model worked with Ubuntu compared to El Capitan (last official supported version) or even Catalina (the last unsupported version I tried with dosdude1's patches, as I didn't know about OCLP at the time - perhaps OCLP didn't even exist when Catalina was out).
Granted it's an older model (compared to yours) and the Linux kernel probably already has support for its touchpad generation baked in, but I'm sure it won't be hard to load an extra driver (e.g. Synaptics?) or tweak some config file to get it to work like on macOS. I had a similar issue with T440 & X240 Thinkpads and the touchpad performance improved dramatically by installing the Synaptics driver from Ubuntu repos (on Ubuntu 20.04 at the time).
Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.
> Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.
Statistically people who use hardware from 15 years ago won't pay much for brand new software licenses :-)
Intel Macs will soon become obsolete. Lots of folks will not just throw away a few years old machines. So between the choice of ditching perfectly fine hardware due to an unsupported OS or switching to Linux, it's really a no-brainer. Unless of course you live in the SV bubble and change devices every 6 months in which case kudos to you.
> Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.
Those companies don't care because those people are non-clients anyway.
Have you ever used said MacBook intensively with OSX? I guarantee you the difference in trackpad performance will be mind boggling and frustrating. Literally the only thing keeping me away from using Linux.
I'm extra careful with compatibility claims after the number of times someone says how Linux works great on whatever Mac, or Mac OS runs great on a Hackintosh, only for me to discover how many "inconsequential" things are broken. Like it'll not sleep, not have wifi or bluetooth, run the fans at 100%, and be missing various forms of hardware accel.
I similarly found the trackpad fine with Linux mint.
Tho I found the difference in gestures quite annoying. Primarily in web apps like Miro. And window / app switching.
With enough hacking around it seemed like all the gesture support was there, but making it all work in the same way as OSX was going to require a lot of configuration.
works yes but it is jumpy and no gestures by default. my ability to precisely mouse over a target and click is significantly diminished from osx. I only installed a few months ago so the loss is still near to me.
I just don't get trackpad gestures on KDE or GNOME under x11. My Magic Trackpad only really "works" when running in a Wayland session of either desktop.
I am constantly astounded watching people use trackpads as their primary cursor control. It's so frustrating watching people just waste your time doing something "the slow way". The least they could do is learn some hotkeys or something.
Liberating an M1 MacBook Air in another 4-5 years is going to be quite something. Asahi is making really good progress and in a couple of years maybe you may be able to hand out M1 MBAs with Linux like candy. My M1 MBA is already so fast compared to my intel DESKTOP from 2018 that I can’t wait to daily drive Linux on it.
I would really like this. I opened up my 2018 t480 thinkpad with arch and xfce on it today, after half a year of using the M1 MBA exclusively, and I realized how much I truly miss using Linux. I don't get a good computingfeel out of macOS -- the last time I did was circa snow leopard. It's someone else's system that I'm allowed to use.
The t480 is really noticeably slower than the MBA though it has twice the RAM. I didn't think there was anything wrong with that at the time, though. I have got a more powerful computer now -- but how much of that power is for me to wield?
I wish I could be as optimistic as you when people here mention that their 8 year old Mac laptops still don't work as well with Linux and some other people mention that their 15 year old Mac laptops do work well.
I mean, if you can wait 15 years for something, more power to you :-)
If it's ok to run graphics on CPU (it supposedly is good enough) then we might have Mx MBAs running linux fairly soon. Hopefully not in 4-5 years anyway!
FYI, "liberating" Intel macbooks has been possible for years, my 2015 mbp has been running Linux since 2019.
The T2 models don't run Linux well still and probably never reach amazing levels. I don't think the keyboard/mouse driver is in the kernel yet still despite it being 5 years on for those models.
Linux has a similar tech with the combo of binfmt_misc and qemu. It's pretty straightforward to setup and then any architecture can run any other architecture in an emulated manner. My ARM Android phone can actually run x86 (slowly) in its Termux Linux environment for example.
I tried running a Terraria server on my PowerPC Mac Mini running Void a few years ago with the user mode QEMU trick. I managed to get the server started but it crashed if a client tried to connect.
If the source is available, how much work is there to add ARM support, other than compile it for ARM? Some package managers compile from source at install time anyway.
I'm sure there are various "I-think-you'll-find-it's-a-bit-more-complicated-than-that"s. I'm interested to learn what they are.
It depends heavily on the project. Maybe it's using a bespoke/old build system that doesn't support targeting arm, obviously any uses of assembly need translation, bugs/compilation issues regarding signed-ness of char in C/C++, or page size. Those are at least all the issues I've encountered.
When Itanium was new, HP contracted with Progeny Linux to help them port Linux software. Despite the fact that Alpha had paved the way for 64-bit support it was a long effort.
Some time ago did Linux install on iMac 27" which didn't accept macOS upgrades anymore due to old hardware (which is very decent!).
I've been using Ubuntu for very long time.
But I started using popOS (Ubuntu based) - and on my - I didn't realize how polished and perfect it is, all Ubuntu muscle memory can stay as is etc. I've got it on other machine (Ryzen with GTX 4090) and all this first class support for deep learning (https://support.system76.com/articles/tensorman/) is great.
OCLP let me run Ventura on a 2010 MBP. It's shockingly stable and runs pretty well. It's working a little harder than it did on Monterey, but I suspect a few updates will have it running cool again.
Is it fast enough? At least compared to previous versions (like Mojave, etc.)..
I have my MBP late 2013 still on Mojave, but willing to move on if it's (almost) as good..
I recently upgraded a Macbook Pro 2012 13" to High Sierra. Works quite well (already had 16GB of ram) and even recently got a security update late last year. I avoided newer OSs as there were complaints about UI performance and stuttering from my research.
The biggest problem is usually the battery just plain giving up. Sometimes blowing up like a balloon and damaging the case. Unfortunately Apple makes it quite challenging to replace the battery on an Air, or any of their modern laptops.
On the older airs, it's very simple. I finally got around to replacing the battery on a 2011 air that I still use every day. Cost about $65 and took about ten minutes. The kit even came with the odd little screwdriver bits I needed.
I’ve got a 2013 Air. I’ve replaced the battery twice and doubled the size of the SSD. Compared to replacing the battery on an iPhone, it’s a piece of cake.
Just buy the battery from iFixit and follow their online instructions.
I run NixOS on several old Chromebooks with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB drives. It's doable if you stay on top of garbage collection. YMMV depending on your use case.
In GEOD, the author alternates freely between "the Duncan Idahos", "the Idahos" and (gasp) "the Duncans". I don't recall ever reading "the Duncans Idaho", but it would be cool.
I think that, even if you accept Apple's rather awkward usage, it's less clear that it works for the Duncan Idaho case; that's a single name which happens to be split into two words, whereas the 'Air' in MacBook Air is a descriptor.
I installed Linux on Macbook Air 2012 the day I bought it in 2012. I actually still have it in use. :)
Back then the driver support was great, until I think 2014 when the security chip was introduced and a few drivers were missing for some years.
T1 was only introduced in 2016 on touch bar MacBook Pro models. The T2 only came too the MacBook Air in 2016. Luckily Linux on Apple Silicon Macs is becoming very good.
I have tried this multiple times on my 2014 MBA and it works mostly. Unfortunately, my model has some weird hardware(?) issue where the screen starts flickering when the intel i915 driver is loaded AND something communicates on the smbus. So if the cooling fan kicks in, or I use the function keys to change keyboard backlight brightness, my screen starts flickering.
Same thing happened when I tried dual booting Windows. I guess Apple has some workaround for this specific hardware model.
Now this Macbook is running Debian and is relegated to be a headless controller for my 3D printer with Klipper. It's pretty amazing for this, as it boots in like 5 seconds.
Well, great advice. Last winter, Apple introduced better end to end encryption for iCloud data. But, there was a catch! All Apple devices required an OS update, or none of your devices could use the better encryption.
I has a MacBook Air 2014 and a slightly newer MacBook that could not be updated. I installed latest Ubuntu LTS on each, and they are now delightful to use. If in the future battery replacements are still available, with occasional Linux updates, these could be "forever laptops."
I tried to do something similar recently with my 2015 12" MacBook, but the hardware support just isn't there. (I've tried both the latest Ubuntu and Fedora; both have issues with the keyboard and trackpad not being usable after sleep.) Unfortunately, given the age of the hardware, I don't have high hopes of that changing.
I have been thinking of going down the Linux route on my 2017 15". But I am unsure if it is even feasible to get it up-and-running with the T2.
With the new ARM processors the discontinuation of support for Intel-based machines is just a question of time even though the hardware is still more than capable.
Yeah, I would expect something in that vein. I think the pros outweigh the sluggishness of desktop rearrangement or non-existent updates. Maybe I would finally get into some driver development if it became my main machine.
I have a 2013 MacBook still runs perfect. I still use it to boot into windows on it the few times I need windows. plus the SD slot on it works where as the one on my adapter which I need to use with the m1 crapped out in months
My 2014 Air is still my personal computer. The battery needs to be replaced but other than that everything still works perfectly fine. When I finally do replace it, I'll probably go with Linux though.
I have a macbook air from 2013 running ubuntu and hosting all kinds of things like home assistant, plex, sonarr, radarr. I placed the laptop in our storage room since 2016. Waiting for its final days :)
Dropped Ubuntu 22.04 on an original 15" rMBP. Nice to finally have a high end Linux laptop. Now, if only the cmd-ctrl functionality was consistent across OSes.
