Recycling my old MacBook 2015

If there's one thing that Linux does better than anything else, it's making available old hardware as if it's nearly brand new. To whit: My old MacBook from 2015. Sadly, the latest OS that it can run is Big Sur which is, to say, vastly outdated by now. However, as it's a perfectly fine machine with a lot of capability for working with remote sites and terminal outputs, I don't want to get rid of it. The form factor is still great (small but extremely lightweight), and I have a 512GB SSD in it. There's no reason to recycle it.

So, off I went: I installed Pop_OS! on it.

Now, the MacBook from 2015 was a very weird creature and I bought it for lightweight traveling. The hardware itself had lots of issues (apparently), which never really hit me per se. I suppose that I'm lucky. Yet there's a weird quirk with the hardware keyboard and trackpad which make it extremely unlikely that any Linux version installed upon it will work "out of the box". That's because it has a rather… unique … way of hooking up the trackpad and keyboard. But, never fear, there is a fix. You'll have to hunt for it because there's a few things to try before it "just works". I got mine working in under ten minutes. AI can help in this respect quite a bit. I suggest using it - spare me your tears about using it. For stuff like this, it can just make things a whole heck of a lot easier. I'm with Linus on this one. It's a tool and it can be used for good or bad. I used it for good in my case.

Now, I have Pop_OS! running and it looks absolutely fantastic. I have to say: I've tried a lot of different distros over the years and this one, so far, looks and feels the nicest. I used to swear by Mint but, to be honest, this looks better and feels better. No shade on Mint though, as it's easily my second favorite "easy distro" to date.

– N.