Convert your old iMac or MacBook into a Linux machine

The vast majority of older Intel iMacs and MacBooks are no longer supported by Apple software updates. These quality machines with retina displays can be repurposed very easily to work as Linux computers.

In this test I used an old 2013 Imac with 8GB of RAM and a 500MB Nvidia graphics card as the test subject.

I began with an installation of Pop Os, which worked okay for the most part – there was some issues with the graphics card, which meant the the display began blanking out and corrupting. I eventually ran into a kernel panic and the machine was unusable. A recovery shell was available, but I was not able to resolve the booting issue. After some investigation, it appears that there is an issue with the Nvidia display drivers, that are are simply not compatible with older Nvidia GPUs such as the one in this 2013 iMac.

Zorin OS on Imac 13

I then installed Ubuntu which worked fine for a time, but then I ran into the same issue. Another kernel panic. After many hours of troubleshooting to reboot the machine, I gave up and decided to install Zorin OS, which is effectively just another derivative of Ubuntu.

Surprisingly it worked without issues. A big issue with Pop OS was power management /screen saver mode. The machine would hibernate and then refuse to wake up, each time requiring a reboot. In Zorin OS the default set up works without any issues, without any tweaking on my part. The machine hibernates and wakes up without any issues.

It also runs at 1GB of memory at idle, compared to my Asus laptop which uses 1.5GB at idle.git

Overall Zorin worked beautifully on my 2013 MacBook. A nice feature of Mac Os is that boot options appears automatically on the screen. One can easily dual boot Mac Os and Linux if one wishes to dual boot – it is a lot more straightforward than on Windows machines.