Hi everyone,
My girlfriend has MacBook Pro from 2012 which has already been upgraded with more Ram and an SSD.
From what I understand, her OS (Catalina) has reached end of life in 2022 and doesn’t get any support from Apple anymore.
As that machine works perfectly, what should she do?
I hate Apple products (even if it’s painful for me to say that they’re good) and I’m a Linux enthusiast, so I’d tell her to install Fedora Asahi, but I wanted to know if the Apple enthusiast crowd had a better idea.
My girlfriend isn’t geeky at all (despite her geeky glasses) and she would want to stay in the safe environment provided by an Apple OS. But we also don’t want to replace that powerful machine as we hate programmed obsoletism.
11 years old
“programmed obsoletism”
Serious question, how old is your laptop?
I have a 2019 Surface Go with Fedora on it and a 2006 Asus with Windows XP on it.
Planning on installing a lightweight Linux on it as it was mainly used for backups (iTunes) of my work iPhone (which I didn’t buy and didn’t choose to have).
But now that I can use my girlfriend’s Mac for that, I don’t need windows anymore. I also have a windows virtual machine in the Surface Go.
Well just to give an update, I’ve now installed Fedora on that MacBook Pro and it was pretty easy. The only thing which didn’t work out of the box was the wifi. I had to install ROM fusion and then it downloaded some drivers.
Otherwise everything ran smoothly except for the installation of the windows 10 virtual machine in gnome boxes. I had installed the flatpak one, but that one doesn’t allow you to use the usb ports, so I had to reinstall the machine on the Rpm version.
So that old beast can now have a long life again!
Look into OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I updated my GFs 2012 Air to Ventura and it’s running okay. A bit clunky around MacOS updates since you have to specifically run patcher again to get graphics acceleration again but otherwise fine. It’s definitely worth it for security updates.
The 2012MBP is a fine machine. I actually just retired one. Being an intel model, you can run any Linux. You don’t need to stick to Ashashi (that’s for Apple silicon chips).
You could also put Windows on there.
Really though, if she likes the Apple ecosystem, go find a 2017/2018 MPB 4 thunderbolt port model. I recently picked one up on fb marketplace with an i7, 16 gigs of ram, and 256gb ssd for $350.
I also dislike often dislike Apple but, a nearly 11yr lifespan is more than reasonable
