Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015
- #Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015 install#
- #Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015 full#
- #Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015 pro#
- #Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015 series#
#Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015 pro#
I have a mid-2010 MacBook Pro that was quickly becoming fairly useless. I will cover my process of experimenting with various distros and why I finally settled on Manjaro, and what hitches I ran into on the way and how I solved them.
#Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015 install#
The nice thing about Linux is that you can install and test drive any of these desktops and choose the one to try from the login screen.In this post I am going to briefly outline the process I went through installing a Linux distro to run as the only OS on my MacBook Pro.
#Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015 full#
I recommend a full blown modern desktop environment for ease of use for a new user. That was my window manager of choice 20 years ago when I ran Linux on a 486 with 4 MB RAM and a few GB of disk drive. I cannot comment on KDE because I don't use it but there are those that like it a lot and report that it is not a resource hog. Some people like the default Unity desktop on Ubuntu which was originally targeted at netbooks. Both are fairly functional without being too bloated. 16.04 would be a good choice and it's an LTS version meaning it will be supported for a long time.įor a desktop I would consider XFCE or Mate. I would avoid Ubuntu 17.10 as it has a *lot* of new stuff like Wayland by default and a return to Gnome from Unity. Ubuntu and Mint are both good candidates for easy installation. With this H/W you can reasonably run any Linux distro so the choice comes down to choosing a distro and desktop suitable for a new user. I would try to match the 4GB stick and bump the RAM to 8GB. If it presently has 5 GB, it is presently populated with a 1GB stick and a 4GB stick.
According to this web page (if I have correctly identified the H/W). That makes a huge difference even for a machine that may not fully support the fastest SATA speeds.
I agree with others who have suggested upgrading the HDD to an SSD. you see where that's going? anyway, welcome to the freedom that comes with being able to choose your own OS, you're one of the few people that actually has control of their computing hardware back, now. you can either install debian and then install sysvinit, which will "disable systemd but still leave it hanging around like a bad smell" or you can go the whole hog, add and actually get rid of it entirely, going back to udisk2, policykit, consolekit and other packages that debian's developers rather foolishly removed.īottom line is, the threshold for "good enough computing" was crossed many many years ago, and it's only the marketing teams DELIBERATELY making the proprietary OSes do more so that your machine APPEARS so slow that you feel you HAVE to buy a new one. The only other thing i recommend is that you NOT install systemd as it actually slows boot times DOWN (as well as making your life geneerally hell). the other desktop i love and thoroughly recommend for end-users is Trinity Desktop. for everyone else i recommend XFCE as it's based on the older gnome2 infrastructure so does well at auto-detecting drives and so on. Someone else here suggested fvwm2: i too love it, because the startup time is well under half a second. i manage fine with chromium running at around 1024x800 and underneath that firefox with 200 tabs open ar around 1024x700 or so (i use a 3000 x 1600 resolution laptop screen). Your main concern is web browsers, which is one application, and you should try to keep the size of the window to the minimum that you can tolerate. don't do it :) keep an eye on things, but libreoffice and a few tabs open in browsers should be fine. this tends to bring even a machine with 16GB of 2400mhz DDR4 RAM to its knees.
The actual OS doesn't techincally matter, none of them will make a blind bit of difference, you have such a fast machine, you might as well pick one that will make your life easiee.Īll apps will work perfectly fine as long as you don't do what i do which is try to run qemu, two web browsers, 3D Graphics Editors, videos, IRC, 2D CAD Packages *and* try to compile the linux kernel all at the same time. you want an S3500 or basically hunt around for anything that has "Intel Power-loss Protection".
#Best linux distro for macbook air early 2015 series#
not the 3700 series which is made *by* intel but using a shitty consumer-grade controller IC from Marvell. by that i mean one with an Intel chipset i.e. the only thing that will make a HUGE difference to speed is if you get yourself a GOOD SSD. it's only the fact that modern OSes are so stuffed with eye candy, adware and freeware that you've been hood-winked into BELIEVING that the OS *is* the computer. 2.4ghz with 5GB of RAM is insanely quick, and an insane amount of RAM.