Elementary OS on a 2011 Macbook Pro

Posted by jaslar
Jan 25, 2020 at 07:31 PM

I was a little bummed when I found out that Chromebooks have an expiration date (no more security updates). My older C100PA, bought in 2017, will expire this year! So I was looking around for a replacement. I’ve lived in elementary for the past couple weeks, got AppCenter going (had to do a command line apt-get update and upgrade, then logout and in again), installed VLC and the dvdlibs to wake up movies and music, and I’m finding it really nice. The battery, a new one, only goes about 3-4 hours, and that’s with an installation of tlp. I also moved from the Epiphany browser to Firefox, with no appreciable loss in speed.

The key feature of elementary is the Pantheon desktop. The aesthetics of the bundled apps are nice, but they lack what I judge necessary functions. (The lovely Quilter markdown editor is an example. It’s clean and fast. But even though you can display headers in an outline panel, you can’t use it to navigate. You can’t fold text on the right pane.) Nonetheless, I find myself looking for excuses to fiddle with this suddenly very interesting laptop. It offends me to have perfectly acceptable hardware crippled by software. Under elementary, I feel like this is a new machine. Very responsive, and quite pretty!

Eventually, I suppose I’ll go looking for a way to install Linux on the Chromebook…