I have a 2015 Macbook Pro that I wasn’t doing anything with and it’s no longer supported by Apple. I decided, since it is “the year of Linux on the desktop”, I’d experiment with Linux again.

One of my biggest problems with Linux over the years (back when I was still a PC person) was trying to get hardware to work with it and the UX is typically an afterthought. In the years since I first experimented with Linux, things have changed drastically. Hardware support, even for Apple hardware, has improved over the years. The UX, especially for my chosen distro, Linux Mint, has drastically improved as well.

So I’m basically a week into using Linux Mint on my Macbook Pro. I did take a brief detour with both Ubuntu and Pop_OS, but found them to run into the same performance issues and issues with waking my Macbook from sleep. Nothing I found online helped, so I quickly went back to Mint, which runs blazing fast on this machine. In fact, it nowruns faster with Mint than it did on macOS. I also haven’t had any hardware issues with Mint with the exception of needing to install some firmware via the command line to get the Facetime camera to work (which I never use anyway).

Prior to installing Linux on what I now call my Mintbook Pro, the machine was just sitting in a corner collecting dust. Now this machine has a whole new life ahead of it. If you have a spare machine, why not give it a shot?