I bought this laptop in late 2016. It’s still a good laptop (8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) and very light.
However, I cannot use it with macOS anymore.
Let’s put Ubuntu Linux on the laptop! I’ll write the installation instructions and the configurations for a fully functional Ubuntu on this MacBook Air, which runs fast and smoothly and brings the laptop back to life!
Although I am a big fan of Arch and EndeavourOS, I first decided to try Ubuntu on this MacBook. Maybe, in the future, I’ll also try using an Arch distribution.
Installation
After having put the Ubuntu 24.10 ISO on a USB stick with Ventoy and inserted the USB stick, Turn on the Mac and immediately press and hold the Option (⌥) key until you see the startup disk selection screen:
Select the entry corresponding to the USB and get to Ventoy menu:
After some time, you should see the familiar Ubuntu splash screen:
Unfortunately, when I got to the desktop, I discovered the WiFi card had not been detected.
I’ll fix that later, after the installation.
I can use my mobile phone: I enabled USB tethering after connecting the phone with a USB cable. USB tethering in Linux works like a charm. I can now go on with the installation with a working Internet connection!
The installation is the standard Ubuntu installation:
Since I don’t want to keep any macOS installation (the space on the SSD wouldn’t be enough anyway), I choose to wipe the entire disk and let Ubuntu select a standard partition scheme.
The installer correctly detected my time zone:
Let’s start the installation, which only takes a few minutes (even considering I’m using my mobile phone connection).
By clicking the terminal icon on the bottom right, you can see the logging of the installation:
Time to restart the installed system!
Configuration
Let’s start fixing the WiFi problem.
This is the WiFi card on the laptop:
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$ lspci -nn | grep Network 03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4360 802.11ac Dual Band Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:43a0] (rev 03) |
It is enough to install these packages:
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sudo apt install broadcom-sta-common broadcom-sta-dkms |
Reboot, and the WiFi is working great!
Then, let’s fix the function keys, which are inverted (so, to have F1, you’d have to press “Fn F1”, which is not ideal). This is documented here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppleKeyboard#Change_Function_Key_behavior.
You can try:
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sudo bash -c "echo 2 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode" |
If it works, you can change this permanently:
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echo options hid_apple fnmode=2 | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf sudo update-initramfs -u -k all |
I have already blogged about Thunderbird and Firefox snap packages, which I don’t like, and how to get back to dep packages.
Final thoughts
As I had already anticipated, the laptop works great with Ubuntu. Everything is smooth and reactive. Even more than with the original old macOS operating system.
I noted that concerning sleep, the default configuration already uses the more power save setting:
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❯ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep s2idle [deep] |
Everything else works great, including all the volume and screen brightness function keys. Moreover, the screen light automatically adjusts depending on the environment illumination!
Power consumption also works fine after installing the powertop package (running that with the “auto-tune” setting) and setting the power profile to “Power Saver” from the Gnome menu:
MacOS probably used to have better power consumption, but this one is acceptable.
It was a nice decision to put Linux on this laptop! 🙂