I was initially delighted at the hardware support. Elementary OSįirst, I tried Elementary OS. I tried installing many of my previous favorite distributions on my old MacBook Air, only to find disappointment. One would think 10 years would be long enough for Mac hardware support to be baked right into every distribution on the market, but one would be sadly mistaken. I have been trying to find a friendly, easy-to-use distribution of Linux that supported my older MacBook Air hardware fresh out of the install process. I can officially say, “by the way, I use Arch.” But, the one place I never had a thought to use any flavor of Linux was on my old MacBook Air. I have used Ubuntu, Elementary OS, Manjaro, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Parrot OS, Kali Linux, and even Arch on occasion in virtual machine environments. I have even produced some Linux-based content for the Back From the Future Show podcast we ran in 2020, teaching our listeners how to better use the command line interface.

I have been a casual user of Linux for a number of years now. So, this is where I decided to turn to the Linux community. I could technically use it with the last supported macOS edition, which I believe is High Sierra, but that would eventually contain vulnerabilities that would never be patched. As one might imagine, it has not been able to receive updates from Apple for quite some time now and I have been thinking of how to keep using it securely. I have an older MacBook Air from 2011, which is the second MacBook I ever purchased, sitting on my desk. It is usually well-made, elegant, and holds up when other laptops do not.

I have admired Apple hardware for quite some time now.

Arch linux macbook pro 2011