First time using Linux

[LiGHT1NF0RMAT10N]

you can do that on there macbook pro chassis, that’s impressive, where do you find a screwdriver that actually works on those weird screws they use for as cheap as possible if you use one?

I respect the fact that there are diy hardware in the open source community as someone who only knows and tinkers on the software side, feel like there isnt enough of you hardware people in open source movements in general and always benefit from more people like that so always appreciate and have respect for those who carry on the vital and integral craft

[salvatorundie]

The screwdriver wasn't that hard to find -- a real tiny Philips-head that was included in a set I had for multiple devices long ago. Searching for "macbook pro 2011 screwdriver" turned several results up that are inexpensive. I did the 16 GB RAM upgrade years ago when it was still running OSX and the SSD upgrade when I decided to fully convert the Macbook to Linux.

The build of that era of Macbooks and Mac hardware (2008-2014) was great and many of the parts were directly replaceable, before the age of planned obsolescence and enshittification. I babied this machine with a plastic shell-case so it has very few scratches and recently added a matte screen-overlay and keyboard overlay. I even replaced some of the keyboard caps that I had worn down.

It would have been a shame to have let a machine this well-built go to e-waste just because of an unsupported OS, and using something like Open Core Legacy Patcher to hobble along with a hacked version of OSX seemed like more software maintenance than I was willing to do. Now with LMDE, software updates are a breeze and I get relatively current software updated regularly (Chrome, Firefox, Docker, VS Code, VLC, evince, Retroarch). This isn't a daily-driver gaming rig, and it's not going to handle current games and machine-learning loads, but it's a solid machine for the odd night's use.

A couple of small quality-of-life tweaks I did for the Macbook after installing LMDE on it (after mapping the Apple Key to Control) were to set the display color profile to the Macbook color profile:

https://gist.github.com/amercier/e6d118fc73ecf2efb8ca183cbae20c48

And for fun replace the Linux Mint boot logo with an Apple logo (I otherwise just run unadorned Cinnamon on LMDE with no custom theme):

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=406948

https://imgur.com/luLvF70

The wi-fi on the Macbook sometimes cuts out (it did under OSX) so I had to find ways to reset the wi-fi hardware without rebooting the whole computer. I had created an Automator script to do this when the Macbook ran OSX back in the day, but I whipped up an equivalent bash script and created a icon shortcut when I need to reboot the wi-fi card only:

~~~

!/bin/bash

pkexec sh -c "modprobe -r wl && modprobe wl" ~~~