How I installed Linux on my old Macbook

21 March 2025

I decided to install Linux on my late 2013 Macbook Pro and it was surprisingly easy. Below is a summary of the steps involved. Note that I can’t guarantee that this will work on your machine as well (for newer macbooks with Apple chips, the process may be less straightforward).

Before you start:

Get started:

I ran into a few minor issues. I’ve turned off Automatic Suspend, because it takes 20 seconds to reactivate, so I’d like some more control over when this happens (you can still put the machine to sleep and save energy by closing it). Also, I still need to figure out the correct keyboard settings (the tilde and backslash are currently linked to the wrong keys). There are some small things I have to get used to, such as using shift-control instead of command in terminal (e.g., shift-control-c to copy), and using command instead of command-space to launch anything (command-space closes the laptop, which still happens to me frequently).

Here are some of the sources I used: Klein, Schabell, apple

21 March 2025 | Categories: howto, linux, open source