Apple is a company with big goals and ambitions: they are the largest smart phone marketshare in the United States, they have been dumping money into AR headsets and electric cars people might not want, and to kill off the right to repair! That’s right everyone, we’re going to be doing the unthinkable–reviving an old 2015 Macbook Air and installing Linux. Apple may have abandoned it, but I won’t, at least my friend won’t!

8 Years Later

First things, some background. The 2015 Macbook Air was released at the beginning of 2015 and came with El Capitan.

(Ah yes, the day Epic Games bragged about Fortnite on Apple computers…)

There’s also multiple physical issues from over the years:

  • The down arrow key is missing, but the key works fine.
  • The hinge for the screen has also seen some wear and tear as the years have gone on.
  • There used to be layers of masking tape on this thing left by their previous “IT guru” who left warnings in all caps saying things like “DO NOT UNPLUG” or whatever. I removed them all for the purposes of this video and they know not to unplug it.

The battery is also bulging out of the case so hard, the casing is also damaged. I’m actually going to have to get those proprietary Apple screwdrivers to remove the case and unplug the battery, because this battery is a fire hazard waiting to happen!

Even though this is a laptop, the battery is thoroughly damaged beyond repair and this thing will need to be plugged in at all times anyway, so removing the battery isn’t that much on an issue. My friend treats this more like a desktop anyway.

This particular laptop I have has received as many software updates as possible and runs Monterey and this is the last version of macOS this poor thing can run. In fact, this computer is on death row. Apple is going to kill off Monterey any day now, especially since Monterey is 2 releases behind Ventura.

Let’s Install Linux

It’s time to leave MacOS behind and install Linux!

Difficulties

Installing Linux isn’t without its problems. First, the very fact that this is Apple hardware makes this an uphill battle. We’re going to be fighting with the firmware. Apple is killing off all support for this device and we will lose access to the ability to reinstall MacOS over Wi-Fi to unsigned versions of MacOS. I tested this on this computer when it was running Sierra.

Apple hardware is also very finicky. Apple uses largely Broadcom chipsets for Wi-Fi and cameras, but they’re custom cards. Thankfully, Broadcom’s drivers are much more usable than they used to be, but it depends highly on what distro and how up to date it is. The webcam does not work at all on Linux, but shockingly, the microphone functions fine. This is because Apple uses a customized Broadcom chip and FaceTime is that sacred.

Cutting Up the Apple

Now you might think you could reinstall the Recovery OS, but you can’t, since it’s tied to the drive. You also can’t boot using Apple’s weird EFI boot thing because it uses an incompatible filesystem (and yes, I’m aware you could build a kernel patch, but poor friend isn’t going to keep up with this if it breaks). This is why all security bets are off, because our access is going to be cut off if the disk is wiped or corrupted, so we need to disable those necessary and now pesky Apple features.

The first thing we need to do is boot into Recovery on MacOS.

System Integrity Protection

You can access the Recovery OS by doing ⌘ + r when you hear the boot chime. From here, we need to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP). Since our god Apple has forsaken us, disabling SIP is necessary to minimize interference from Apple on what Linux is doing.

In Recovery, click on Utilities, then Terminal. Then run csrutil disable.

Firmware Password

We need to also disable the firmware password. There’s not going to be a way to configure the firmware password without MacOS. The firmware password also hampers the boot process, especially with non-Apple bootloaders. As my friend is victim to default settings, they did not set a firmware password.

In Recovery, click on Utilities, then Startup Security Utility. Then follow the prompts to disable your firmware password.

Use MacOS to create a copy

As a failsafe, you can create a MacOS boot drive using a USB drive with previous versions of MacOS. I have a Monterey USB in the bag in case I mess up somewhere or need to reinstall MacOS.

Apple has a nifty guide on precisely which command you need for which OS.

Which Distro?

Now we come to a conundrum: what distro to install? Here’s what I tested:

  • Fedora: Broadcom Wi-Fi is very spotty and putting the computer to sleep doesn’t work. The Fedora 37 installer also fails and will not proceed. This is unacceptable and apparently has been going for since the launch of Fedora 37. No way I’m telling my friend to write a custom grub entry.
  • openSUSE Tumbleweed will install correctly and the Broadcom drivers function great. The problem is closing the lid will cause the computer to perpetually show a black screen. This is also not good, but still better than Fedora.
  • Arch: This probably works, but no way I’m giving Arch to my normie friend. I hear Manjaro runs fine, which instead of using that dumpster fire, use Arch instead.
  • Debian: Sleeping doesn’t work and proprietary Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers will not reconnect after an hour when I tried it a few years ago. It’s not very usable.

None of my favorite distros work for what I need! But you don’t want to hear what doesn’t work! What does?

Ubuntu

I know this might come as a shock despite how hard I found the best was Ubuntu. The installer correctly identified all the drivers and while I haven’t tested the new Ubuntu installer based on Flutter, if the Ubiquiti works this well, I’m sure it’s pretty good with the Flutter one. Ubuntu seemingly has a lot of polish around the Mac and everything except the webcam works great.

Prep Your USB

While this week might be Ubuntu release day, I’m going to be installing the LTS, not interim release 23.04. Since we’re stuck using a stable distribution, it’s better anyway as we are in the Canonical ecosystem.

As a preface before going in, you might bust out that Ventoy USB with all your favorite Linux distros in it, The problem is Ventoy is fundamentally incompatible with Apple firmware, so you can’t use it to boot into anything, even with SIP disabled and no firmware password. You’re going to have to boot through USB on this one.

Also, I didn’t go down the rabbit hole of alternative bootloaders, like rEFInd, Clover, and OpenCore. If you do choose a custom bootloader, do it before you blow macOS away. I’m also not talking about some custom patches.

Make My Mac Normie Proof

  • Disable Ubuntu telemetry
  • Configure update-manager, apt, and snap to auto-update everything
  • A lot of people don’t like Snaps, but I want to strongly recommend against removing it. Although Snaps have many problems, Snaps are still superior to using unsecured native packages. The Ubuntu Software Store is also the hub where you control all of your Snap permissions, so you want to keep that too.
  • As an addition, I dropped in the GNOME Software. GNOME Software defaults to Flatpak and I would like to push my friend in this direction. It also supports installing apt and Snap packages.
  • I installed the Brave Browser and configured it to a basic level.
  • I installed ONLYOFFICE and VLC to play videos and open office documents.
  • AppArmor