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
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 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?
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!
I haven’t tried any games yet, but i’m going to set up steam shortly so we’ll see
thanks for the feedback…this was a fun project!
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!!
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.
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
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!!