Putting Manjaro on a 2015 Macbook Air

09 Sep 2024 by cthos
About 5 min

As the world hurtles more towards shoving Generative AI into absolutely everything to make investors happy, I've been looking more into hardware sustainability and the viability of running things for longer (especially if they don't try to bake generative AI right into the operating system).

Something that's been chewing at the back of my brain for a while is the 11" Macbook Air. The form factor on that tiny laptop is awesome for how portable it is, but it was underpowered at the time for MacOS so I ditched mine.

Nearly a decade later, I keep thinking about it, it really was one of the best little not-a-netbook spiritual successors to those netbooks of yore. I kept thinking about how it might be nice to have a pretty portable writing machine for someone and I was curious how well it would work with that. So I've been keeping an eye on my local FreeGeek eBay store until I saw one in good condition, and snapped it up (for just over $100).

I also have an iPad which I use for this writing use case and I'll likely continue to do so, this is partially a fun thought exercise.

The 2015 MBA can only be upgraded to Monterey at the latest, and that's what came on the one I bought. I did boot into that and play around for a while and the experience was "okay". Unfortunately, running Monteray on something with only 4 GB of RAM is a bit of a rough go. It managed to browse the web okay but it was already a little sluggish just poking around.

Enter Manjaro!

To the former question, that's mostly because I can reliably run linux on a potato, and I was sure any number of distros would run on a nearly decade-old machine with strong memory constraints well.

The main issue was going to be drivers, older Apple hardware is usually fairly well supported but there are a bunch of little quirks that you have to deal with. So I set out to find a distro that was going to "mostly" work out of the box.

That's why I picked Manjaro with Xfce. The Xfce window manager is extremely lightweight (while still looking pretty great) and Manjaro is an Arch distro with pretty solid support for this particular model of Macbook Air. Installing it was a breeze, simply creating a bootable USB drive and we were on our way. Now, I expected to have to deal with Wifi driver issues after I installed Manjaro, because during the install wifi was not working. However, once I'd booted into it for the first time the wifi drivers just worked. That was a pleasant surprise. Wifi drivers have been my recurring Linux nightmare since the early 2000s.

After that, it all "just worked" with some minor exceptions, which were:

This is perhaps a huge deal for someone who wants to use this thing for video conferences, but it's not a big problem for me.

Luckily the Arch Wiki has a whole page of troubleshooting steps, webcam one of them. I'll eventually go through the steps and report back, but others have gotten it working with this particular model so I'm not worried about that.

By default, the screen's color profile is "muted" and off. Fortunately, Arch Wiki to the rescue again. The installation page has a reference to which color profiles to use.

This one shocked me the most, I use Emojis a lot on my self-hosted Outline instance. It was very apparent when I looked at it that they were missing.

Happily, this is also readily fixable via a single command: pamac install noto-fonts-emoji

Yeah, like everything else there's a reference on the Arch wiki. I've not tried this yet, but I'm also pretty confident it'll work. It doesn't take very long to boot the system cold, so it's not really been a problem.

The keyboard is still really solid and pleasant to type on. It predates all of the butterfly keyboard problems and I'm honestly a little surprised that there are no issues on this used model that I purchased.

The form factor is hard to beat. The extra length means it's super comfortable to work on, with lots of space to place your palms while typing. It's also got a full function row which is always appreciated (I'm looking at you, touchbar mac). Unlike netbooks, it's actually really easy to clack away on without feeling too cramped.

I've gotta say I'm a huge USB-C fan, it makes life a lot easier if you only need a single cable for everything from external displays, charging, data transfer and the like. I'd forgotten how annoying it is to have to carry an entire magsafe charger and regular USB-A cables and maybe a thunderbolt 2 cable (not that this thing's going to work well on modern monitors). That'll likely be a limiting factor, especially because....

It's bad. Real bad. Like 4 hours bad. I could potentially squeeze out another hour out of this thing if I were to replace the battery (iFixit sells replacement parts for this), but it might not actually be worth the effort until the battery gets worse.

The screen is a little small for 2024 and a lot of things assume you're going to be on a larger (or much smaller) display if you're on a computer and not something like a tablet with a touch interface. The resolution is also kinda low, but I didn't find it particularly problematic for my use-case which is writing.

The brightness is also a bit dim, which would make using this outside in bright light fairly difficult, which is a bummer since it's so portable it's going to be a problem.

I actually really liked experimenting with this. At this point I've tried it in a couple of different

tech blog linux