At the beginning of November, I got a larger SSD and having grown tired of my 12-year-old MacBook Pro, I decided to take a leap and see if I could live with Linux. After just short of 3 months, I decided to switch back.
Linux worked fine for a while. There were occasionally hiccups in my setup that took addressing, but I was able to browse, to program, even to play games. Linux does everything that Windows or macOS does.
But a couple of months into my Linux experience, I was talking to my wife about using it. I had kind of hard time putting into words what I was feeling and then I kind of stumbled into it. I wasn’t finding any joy in using Linux. It was a computer, and that was fine. Some folks might say that its absurd to be looking for joy while using a computer. Computers are tools.
Yes, computers are tools. But my computer is probably the single most used tool in my house. I am on it every single day. And spending that much time with a tool, you want it to be comfortable.
Everything old is new again
I went and grabbed a very old version of macOS – the last one supported by this computer – made a USB installer, wiped the drive and installed. I thought maybe it’d be okay but I ran into a couple of problems:
First, I was experiencing regular input freezes. No Mouse, no keyboard. That’s bad news. Second, I tried to install Brave and found that Chromium had dropped support for macOS Big Sur (11). Basically, I couldn’t use the browser I wanted to. This isn’t to say that I couldn’t use Firefox, but even if that works forever, other things are going to start causing problems.
So in spite of a bad experience a little while back, I went an got a copy of OpenCore Legacy Patcher and started going through the process of creating a patched version of macOS Sequoia (15) to install on my unsupported Mac.
If you’re willing to do the smallest amount of reading, you can get yourself running a very recent version of macOS on old hardware. And you can make the patching almost invisible.
One little snafu…
When I was copying data off of the Linux drive, I was trying to be really careful to make sure that I got everything. I explicitly exported my GPG keys so I could easily import them into my new setup.
Well, somehow, I managed to leave them on the old system and not put them in the disk that I copied everything over on. So that key is lost to time. Fortunately it’s got an expiration date of a year, so it won’t be a problem for too long. In the meantime, I’ve made myself a new key.
Accidental Experiment
As I’m just a day into this again, I kind of stumbled into an idea: Can I use my mac without issue without signing into any of Apple’s services. No account on the system, and no using the App Store. I think it’ll probably work. Maybe.
I’m hoping this will hold me over until I can get a new MacBook. I’ve got some money set aside, but am waiting for the right machine.
No, obviously I didn’t install MacOS 8 onto my computer. I just didn’t have a picture, so I thought I’d do something funny.