Still fixing up old Macs. This is my wife's old 2015 MacBook that has been cleaned up and had it's battery replaced (I'm testing that now).
Currently it has macOS 12 (Monterey), which stopped getting security updates from Apple in July of this year. That will not do, so the next step will be using #OpenCoreLegacyPatcher to let me update to a supported macOS or alternatively, I install a modern Linux on it.
Ok the recent Safari zero-day (which was only patched for supported versions of macOS) reminded me I should not leave that machine on macOS 12 (Monterey) any longer.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/121756
It is now upgraded to macOS 13 (Ventura). 😉
FWIW, this old Intel MacBook did get Safari updated yesterday, after using #OCLP to update to Ventura.
Had it been down to Apple, this machine could have been a botnet now for all they care. 😢
At least one other user who somehow got past the WiFi problems on install (maybe they used alt networking connection via WiFi or ethernet adapter 🤷) having harware issues with the Camera and Keyboard backlight (both of which work with Ubuntu). The post is two years old and these issues might now be resolved but given my WiFi installer issues, I could not count on it. So this does not seem worth the hassle when Ubuntu works out of the box and even macOS Ventura could be installed (again with no obvious downsides) via #OCLP.
I'm putting this down as a fail for Google. Still at least they tried, unlike Apple, who consider this machine eWaste.
Ok to be fair to ChromeOS here, it seems I made a mistake. My camera was not working under Ubuntu out of the box either.
Oh well… I fixed that now as well. 🎥 😉
P.S. And yes, I need to shave.
EDIT: I used the following. Though I had to tweak the instructions slightly based on feedback others gave in issue reports for Ubuntu 24.04. Not too bad in the end though. I even extracted and installed the sensor calibration files.
@escapetofreedom Well there are updates at the moment listed on their blog but I guess the underlying Linux core part of the OS is a bit out of date and this is why. 🤷
But yeah there is talk now of ChromeOS going away or merging with Android in some fashion, so who knows long term. Just running a straight Linux distro is probably safer from a support perspective.
Again, I was mainly just curious but I will call this a fail for now. There might be some way to get it to work or perhaps it will work in the future but why bother when there are other (better) options.
Ruarí Ødegaard
Ivan Jelić
djbiker