A friend wants to gift me an old macbook pro he no longer uses. Specs follow:

MacBook Pro, Core i5, 2.8 GHz (I5-4308U), model A1502 (EMC 2875), Retina Mid-2014 13", MacBookPro11,1, RAM 8 GB, VRAM 1.5 GB, Storage 512 GB SSD

Out of principle I don’t use anything made by that brand and the only way I see myself using the hardware is if I can nuke the software and install any linux distro, ubuntu is the distro I know best.

Can it be done?

Any drawbacks?

It’s a model with a screwed aluminum case, meaning I cannot unplug the battery when I don’t need it. How long does it last?

Alternatively, what could I use this notebook for? Is there anything apple does better than linux that deserves I don’t nuke it?

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘English
    3•10 months ago

    I have a 2010 running Mint LMDE, and it runs so much better than the Mac os x that it had did. The i5 is an Intel CPU, so it should be fully possible. Download a live image and boot from it. Test it out. If it works as expected, I stall. The 2010 has a screw off bottom, so I switched out the drive to preserve the original OS X, since the installation may not be available for much longer.

    Edit: sorry I didn’t answer the “Is there anything apple does better than linux that deserves I don’t nuke it?” question. I like to answer these types of posts as impartial as possible. Since I don’t actually like Mac OS X’s UI and UX, I didn’t feel I could do that. I can only recommend that you as I did, and preserve the original drive if possible, so you can go back to Mac OS X if you want.