New Linux Machine

Had a good day yesterday!!! I have an old Lenovo T420 that I installed Ubuntu Linux on to mess around with and learn. Ok, turns out I like Linux OS but the Lenovo hardware is meh! I dug up a 2011 MacBook Pro with an original Sandy Bridge i7, 750GB HD and 8GB RAM and installed Linux Mint (Also a Debian Distro) on it!! Mint installed fairly easily, but the WiFi didn’t work! Did some quick research and found a driver for the Broadcom chip, installed it and bingo - like a brand new MBPro running Linux - Loaded a ton of software like LibreOffice, GIMP , Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird Mail etc! The BEST thing is I took an 11 year old MacBook Pro, Free OS, and Free applications and I now have a smokin laptop which is now extremely useful!!! Sweet

3 Likes

A side note, I always worry about operating a laptop on a soft surface like a bed or rug or even on your actual lap :wink: It’s always been my belief that airflow works better when laptops are used on a hard surface.

But congrats, that looks great… can it run Crysis? :wink:

2 Likes

Agreed, i just have 2 other computers, an iPad Pro and lots of other crap on my desk so i stuck it on the bed in my office to take the pic! :grinning:

I haven’t tried any games yet, but i’m going to set up steam shortly so we’ll see :slightly_smiling_face:

thanks for the feedback…this was a fun project! :+1:

its a testament to the quality of today’s linux distros, that I only had to find one driver on such an old system for everything to work!!

1 Like

hmmm, turns out that on this system, with this OS, Chromium is faster than Firefox! just fyi

I have Mint running on a 2010 Sony Vaio laptop, Core i7, 8GB RAM, but I replaced the HDD with an SSD and it made a huge difference to the performance. You can get a 500GB drive for under 60€ here and a 1TB drive is around 100€ at the moment, so it is a cheap way to give the old MBP a performance boost.

Chromium’s V8 rendering engine is always faster than Firefox, but, generally, modern PCs are so fast that you can’t see the difference in every day browsing. But I use Firefox for the security aspects, so would stick to FF or maybe use Brave, if the performance difference is that great.

1 Like

Thanks David. I’m still using Firefox for security as well! That’s a good idea about the SSD, i may do that as well

1 Like

Well, 5 days gone by and this laptop runs like it was designed for Linux. I can’t find any issues with the hardware or with the software I’ve installed on this guy! Glad @Leo spends a lot time talking about Linux, which is what got me working on this project! A Linux MBPro is sweet!!

2 Likes