My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
After all, why not? Why shouldn't I build a Beowulf of my own?
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Im strongly considering a decent into madness. Where should I start if the computer I will need to adapt is a 12 year old Macbook pro?
Disclaimer: I would start with an "eWaste" computer from eBay, so I don't lose my main machine.
As someone mentioned, Dell Optiplex is a popular option.
We expect a flood of them (and others) to hit secondary used markets soon as companies offload anything that cannot run Windows 11 with secure boot enabled.
Disclaimer aside, assuming the 12 year old Macboom Pro is the secondary machine, the usual guidance applies:
- start with a distro that lets you test boot with a Live USB key.
- when in doubt, try Linux Mint first.
We love to debate the merits of our favorite distros, but when I was just getting started, I quickly discovered that most of what I wanted to try out actually ran on any distro. The only thing that varried was how many commands I needed to set each thing up.
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I had manjaro on my 2012 MacBook for a while. It dual booted even. So I guess Arch?
MacBooks with intel chip are some of the best hardware to put Linux on, there are plenty of guides online on how to liberate your MacBook with Linux.
I tested a bunch of distros based on Debian, Arch and Fedora. By far, the easiest one was EndeavourOS just because it recognized the WiFi driver from the Live USB for me. Otherwise you will need to use a mobile phone with USB tethering to share internet so you can install the broadcom driver. Maybe things changed, but this was my experience in 2023.
Another driver you will need to install is the camera facetimehd . Everything else worked out-of-the-box for me.
After that, all the Linux variants I tried worked great, and it was mostly about distro philosophies and deciding the desktop environments (DE) I wanted to use, and that can be a bit overwhelming at first.
If that is your first experience, I just recommend to start with KDE or gnome. I find gnome works ok from the start, but KDE is easier to tweak. You can always test them from a Linux Live USB before committing them to your hardware. Steam Deck uses KDE for desktop mode.
There are others that are prettier or lighter you can test too: cinnamon, XFCE, MATE. Or even windows managers, but I would leave them alone until you are a bit more comfortable with Linux.
here are a few links in case some people need it in the future:
- facetimehd https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd/wiki/Installation
- https://boilingsteam.com/liberating-the-macbook-air-2013-with-linux-complete-guide/ (sorry for the plug, but it shows all my experience installing with an in-depth guide)
- https://endeavouros.com/
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It's been a couple of weeks since i switched to mint and gotta tell you that this is very tempting
I run a Windows 7 laptop and bought a PC at Value Village and maxed out the RAM thanks to Aliexpress. Junk FTW!!
I feel so attacked. The accuracy of this is unreal.
Started with a NAS for me. Now my old laptop runs a distal distro and I'm thinking of all the "worthless" computers that can't run windows 11 that I might be able to buy for cheap...
Me, ~~fighting with~~ using an am5 chipset & nvidia graphics card for Wayland based distros because damn it, who needs a working machine anyway: "Heh, guess I'm not a clown"
OP after trying Linux:
What? Donโt look at me like that! I totally need 70 computers! Yes theyโre useful! They all have their purpose! That one? Its job is to be force-fed whatever weird obscure Linux distribution I just heard of! Oh, that one? Thatโs for testing Arch Linux configs on 25 year old hardware!