Tried for half the weekend to get elementary to work, it just refused to install for reasons unknown.
Gone with Mint for now.
I like the hardware (an old Intel MacBook Air) and didn’t want it to go to waste.
I’ll see how I get on with this desktop. Went feet first straight to bare metal because I couldn’t be bothered with dual boot. It was too much faff. Would value any insight from others who’ve found a lovely distro/DE combo with these tiny machines.
Making my first moves away from proprietary software. Thanks largely to being inspired by you delightful folk.


I’m using MX Linux (KDE) on an Early 2015 Macbook Air with a replaced battery. It’s my backup/travel laptop, but so far I like it quite a bit. No dual boot for me either. Nothing officially supported by the machine is getting updates, and even the newest OSX you can cram on there only has a year or so left, IIRC.
Thanks, I’ll look into MX. I wanted to try Endeavour because the KDE looked appealing, but when booting from the live iso, the kb, trackpad, wifi weren’t working.
The only thing I had to do with Mint was install the Broadcom wifi driver.
I haven’t tried the webcam, but everything else, including WiFi, worked out of the box for me. The KDE version uses modern Plasma and is not a distro that moves hell and high water to get something working on a potato, but overall it is designed with middle-old machines like these in mind.
I’m sure a million other distros will work as well or better, but I do like MX, and it made me smile to see a child of the Mepis LiveCDs I used 20 years ago is still around.