Modern KDE on a 2010 MacBook
Apple and Microsoft don’t think a Core 2 Duo is enough anymore, but Linux still takes all comers
I have the youtuber Action Retro to blame for this one. He does frankly unspeakable things to old Macs1 from unreasonable upgrades to installing Linux (often both), which I find as inspiring as I do horrifying. Accordingly, more than a year ago now I sniped myself into trawling trademe for cheap MacBooks, and found one for a reasonable price that was only about 13 years old.
For context, I’m not a Mac person at all. I used some in school and they were fine, but my uninformed opinion has always been that the hardware was probably good but I couldn’t afford it and didn’t need it. Much as the battery life on modern Apple Silicon is truly awe-inspiring I need it even less now—maybe if I ever went back to uni, but if I did that I’d need to save the money pretty badly. But ultimately I’m not very familiar with the Apple ecosystem of any era and only know it by reputation.
The device I found was a 13 inch “Mid-2010 MacBook 7,1”, which didn’t mean a whole lot to me. In 2010 it seems there were three models of Apple notebook computers: the MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro (nowdays you only get the Air and Pro), with the straight MacBook being the lowest spec and cheapest at only $999 of your 2010 American Dollars.2 All my sources want to tell me that this is a “unibody” MacBook but that doesn’t mean anything to me, structurally it just seems like a laptop. I’ve named it “Crabapple”.
Visually it’s clearly an Apple device (it does have that big light on the back after all), but at the same time the white plastic is very much not modern Apple. In fact the Pro and especially Air models of the same era are what scream “MacBook” to me. We get a 16:10 1280x800 screen, two whole USB 2.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio port, and Mini DisplayPort, as was the style at the time. But we also get full-sized gigabit ethernet and an honest-to-goodness DVD drive, both of which I sincerely miss on more modern devices.
This particular machine has clearly had many owners, including the now-defunct e-recyclers We Reuse I.T. Ltd which left their sticker on the rubber “non-slip” bottom, and hasn’t survived the ages completely unscathed. It has a small crack at the top of the screen, which luckily is almost invisible in use, there are cracks around the hinges that don’t appear to be expanding, and that non-slip coating has partially peeled off.3
This was the era of the Intel Mac, and it’s honestly wild to me that this thing has a Core 2 Duo like a normal computer.4 Some kind soul (probably the refurbishers) have upgraded the original 2GB of RAM to 4GB, and while I could upgrade this further—potentially as high as 16GB, firmware permitting—but I promise you that isn’t the limiting factor with this device. We also have a Nvidia GeForce 320M for a GPU, but more on that later.
The only modification I’ve made to the hardware myself is to swap the spinning rust drive with the cheapest 2.5” SSD I could buy. I haven’t actually converted my life to SSDs generally yet (that’s a later-this-year plan, I’m saving up to refit a new-to-me desktop) but there’s a limit to how much of my life I want to spend waiting around. Also on my lengthy list of computer-related quirks is that I tend to go for tiling window managers or simple interfaces like Xfce, but with this machine I was inspired to search for something considerably more fancy. Wouldn’t it be fun to make the Crabapple Mac look like a “real” Mac?
I tried OpenSUSE, Fedora, Kubuntu, and ElementaryOS, which were neat but I remember there being various graphical glitches and other rough spots. This isn’t at all surprising: while booting on an x86 Mac is not the same as with an ARM or PowerPC Mac, it’s still not exactly the platform these operating systems are normally intended for and I don’t blame them for their glitches. Frankly I’m surprised that just holding ⌥ Option to boot in EFI mode was all I needed to do to boot into a live environment.5
I also tried KDE neon, but I didn’t have it as a serious candidate. For those unfamiliar KDE neon is a distro that the KDE devs themselves maintain, adapted from Ubuntu LTS releases but using the latest and greatest KDE packages. Increasingly neon seems to be a distribution that people use seriously, but I confess I still think of it as a testing and demonstration OS—and certainly not suitable for old hardware.
But it worked! And so that’s what I installed, and I’ve been happy since.
Now to be clear, there’s no video watching going on on this device: even at 480p modern youtube is stuttering horribly. But I primarily use this machine on the couch to write code and blog posts while watching those same videos on a real TV, so that’s neither here nor there. What it can do, despite only 4GB of RAM, is browse the internet.
Well, the good parts of the internet. Cohost was great for this thing, as only the worst of the CSS crimes really gave it grief. My RSS reader, FreshRSS, is also no problem. Mastodon’s web interface… is pretty borderline, alas; better to use my phone there. But the kind of websites I use to research things for a blog post or another project? Completely fine, just as they should be. Hardware wise the touchpad works perfectly, as do the screen brightness controls and the keyboard generally, and the battery will last multiple hours6 doing it all which is great.
Gaming is obviously a bit of an ask. Nethack is fine—I’d be concerned if it wasn’t—but even at the point of smaller parks in OpenRCT2 you’re losing framerate, which ruined a planned couch playthrough of that game alas. The KDE settings and updates UI also runs quite slow which is a real shame and a problem for the kind of limitless configuration that KDE is famous for.
There are, I concede, a few other issues. The wifi chip likes to disconnect when in heavy use, such as when downloading updates, but that is where the ethernet port comes in handy and it doesn’t have much of an impact on say, a web browser or ssh session. Crabapple also runs quite hot, which is annoying in the summer and probably a GPU driver issue.
And in fact I was going to talk here about how the Nouveau Nvidia drivers no-longer support the 320M GPU, because earlier this year I found that the update to the 6.5 kernel broke the graphics and I had to go back to 6.2.7 This would have put a serious crimp on the long-term viability of the Mid-2010 MacBook as a plug-and-play system, because during or after installation you’d have to downgrade the kernel and that would be a pain.
But while drafting this post I tried booting Crabapple into 6.8, the other kernel currently installed, and while it took forever to boot for some reason it did work—and I suspect that the extra boot time is my own fault somehow. Basically it means that (even if it requires a reinstall someday) this machine will work for the forseeable. That being said, it’s probably worth figuring out how to install the proprietary graphics drivers before summer, because Nouveau is running the GPU at well over 65°C8 which made for a warm lap experience last year.
I said I wanted to try turning the KDE interface into MacOS. Unfortunately, the slow settings interface has been the undoing of that plan: I need to install KDE onto a faster machine and try things out there, and then replicate what I come up with locally. In the meantime, it just looks like Windows 119 which is also kind of funny.
I did all this more than a year ago, and in the last month KDE neon has been “rebased” onto Ubuntu 24.04 and I started getting update prompts. After considering it for a while (I normally do a complete reinstall rather than a version upgrade for my systems) I decided to go for it. What do I have to lose?
Well it took a couple of hours on the slow CPU and SSD, but it worked! I lost a few programs that I wasn’t really using and can reinstall, and it changed my GRUB settings so that I had to switch back to the older kernel again, but hey, it’s fine. That’s not too surprising in hindsight, since the new KDE Plasma 6 version installed without incident earlier this year.
And I’m so happy with that. I don’t know if I go in for permacomputing, I haven’t looked into it properly, but I’m a huge fan of continuing to use the old stuff that you and others have lying around. 4GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo is so much computer; why shouldn’t it run the latest and greatest operating systems and desktops? Neither Apple or Microsoft want you to do that, but we don’t have to listen to their ewaste-promoting nonsense.
Anyway, if you have any suggestions for how I can theme the desktop better I’m all ears. In the meantime though I’m happy to be using a great machine for as long as it will last. Go Crabapple!
And PCs; if anything those get worse treatment but they’re less common.↩︎
I always feel weird whenever people quote the price of a computer adjusted for inflation, because technology just doesn’t follow the same patterns as the rest of the stuff that goes into a CPI basket. That said, if you must know, by the inflation calculator I found USD999 in 2010 would be USD1444 in 2024, which is nearly $2400 NZD today—something nearing 40x what I paid for the thing.↩︎
Supposedly Apple had a replacement program for this fault, but somehow I don’t think they’d take mine now.↩︎
I had wondered if the Intel Inside sticker had been removed but more fool me: Macs never had those and now of course never will.↩︎
I’m so surprised that I wonder if there’s some other element that I’m forgetting, but I don’t remember futzing around with grub like this article on Macworld would have had me do back in 2016.↩︎
As in, it lasts more than 2.5 hours—I have pretty low standards when it comes to laptops.↩︎
6.2 is not an LTS kernel for Linux generally or Ubuntu specifically which isn’t ideal; I’m not sure why that was the one I picked but at this point I’m afraid to look a working configuration in the mouth.↩︎
It actually hit 80°C while I was editing the pictures for this post.↩︎