Make old Macs work with Linux: restart Apple computers with Manjaro Linux

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If Apple had done what it wanted, a seven-year-old Mac belonged to the recycling yard. After approximately this period, the manufacturer no longer provides updates to its devices. If you do not accept this and want to continue to exploit your old treasures – and especially in safety – equip them with a suitable Linux. This means that the life of the computer not only continues with new updates, but you can also maintain familiar macOS operating habits – assuming a little manual work. Our self-experience shows: It works better than expected.


A 2009 iMac serves as the physical base for this excursion into the Linux world. A dozen years ago, it was the bottom right model of Apple’s all-in-one desktops: a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a graphics card with 512MB of its own VRAM, officially a maximum of 4 GB of RAM. The only notable change that our iMac has undergone in the meantime: the hard drive has been replaced by a 1TB SSD. By the way: the base does not have to be a Mac, most of the following instructions can also be transferred on standard PC hardware.

Mac App Store update view in Mac OS X 10.11 has lost style information and is difficult to use.

(Photo: Immo Junghärtchen)

In the fall of 2015, our computer was last upgraded to macOS X 10.11. In recent years, only a few security fixes have been released sporadically. This has consequences: The built-in Safari browser mocks when it is supposed to open encrypted pages, and the Mac App Store can hardly be used. It’s no longer fun. Fans of free software like to recommend Linux in such situations: it costs nothing, works on older devices, saves resources, and can be individually adapted. This is a central focus of this article: the operation of the operating system works in Linux as before, or at least in a similar way to what we are used to from the Mac. Control elements should appear in the same places on the screen, keyboard shortcuts should trigger the same as on Mac and of course a dock should find its place at the bottom of the screen.

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