Linux is a good the only way to continue to use this well manufactured computer for average tasks in a secure manner.”ĪlwaysManaged: “Just out of curiosity, how is this “reviving” the computer? If it already had OSX on it, why not just restore it to factory settings and upgrade it to whatever the latest release it’ll run is?

The latest OS X which is running on it (Lion) does not get any security updates anymore. It is not supported by the latest OS X versions. Macbookairquestion: “Apple want you to replace their products every several years. If you encounter this problem just use rEFInd and be done with it.” Canonical at some point shipped a specific EFI+Mac version for that reason I believe. Some distros don’t include EFI stubs for both architectures. Which means that downloading a 64-bit distro doesn’t automatically guarantee that you can boot from it.

Tiv: “Just keep in mind that there are Macs out there that have a 32-bit UEFI implementation and a 64-bit CPU. I use them for testing software for specific use cases so I don’t care about efficiency.” Had some issues on install, so I haven’t done much with that, but I might try again today.”ĬompsciKinder: “I run g4 and g5 powermac with ubuntu ppc. I have an iMac G3 that I was trying to get Lubuntu installed, just for fun. As the screen is good and big, and power consumption quite low, it makes a perfect second computer for monitoring and administrating my rtmp server.”īaronVonD: “You can also download a PowerPC version of Deb/Ubuntu for even older Macs, run that using lxde or any other light weight environment. Noxygen: “I still use an IMac from 2008 under linux. i like using used/ refurbished machines, but there are boundaries!” the effort to support all those different models is too high, comparing to a fairly standard and well tested raspi3 setup. as others have pointed out, they just use a hell lot of power, while not being reliable. Maximiliankolb: “i don’t want to be judgmental in any kind of way, but using machines slower than a new raspi3 for 30$ is probably a waste of resources itself. I even have some shit laptop with the latest Debian where I don’t even run a GUI at all and just use the terminal and tmux.”įaissaloo: “…with OSX you have a choice between incompatibility and planned obsolescence. For example, you could choose a more bare bones distribution, you could choose a very simple desktop environment (Openbox instead of Unity), etc. Upgrading to latest OSX with old hardware is definitely going to see a performance decrease but doing so with Linux it may not be the case. IBlowAtCoding: “Linux is very modular and customizable. The article on FOSS Force about using old Macs to run Linux caught the attention of Linux redditors and they shared their thoughts about it:

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