Ex-technologist, now an artist. My art: (https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli)

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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • If these Macbook Airs are from 2011/2013 (I expect so, based on the prices you mentioned), you might need to buy a usb wifi btw. The Linux driver, and the official broadcomm driver is buggy with latest versions of the kernel. On my mid-2011 macbook air there would be a crash when downloading lots of data (e.g. when updating the system), and on my 2013 one, it wouldn’t wake up from sleep. Both issues were due to the buggy wifi driver. So I bought a tp-link super tiny usb wifi stick, and it works out of the box (I had to blacklist of course the broadcomm drivers before).

    One last thing is that Elementary requires 1.2 GB of RAM to boot up, and these machines usually come with 4 GB. Make sure you have created a 4 GB swap file in there. Alternatively, Linux Mint can be made to boot up at 750 MB of RAM after removing some services. Either way, make sure you have created a swap partition.


  • It works but be careful with wifi. The other user said that it works out of the box with endeavourOS, and I know you can install it later with Linux Mint too, but the problem is that this wifi driver for the older chips (from 2011 to 2013 at least) is buggy. In my 2011 macbook air it would crash the whole OS on heavy downloads, and on my 2012 one it won’t come up from sleep. So I bought a super tiny supported usb wifi dongle to deal with the problem. Now my two macbook airs work 100% with Linux.

    My 2015 macbook air works great with the linux wifi driver, but it has no web cam support, and the driver on github is buggy and not updated for newer kernels anymore.