Modern Ubuntu is KILLER on old Intel Macs!

today's linuxy Shenanigans are brought to you by Squarespace but more on that in a bit the 11 inch MacBook Air wait wait wait don't click off yet the good old 11-inch MacBook Air gets a lot of crap as the cheap entry-level throwaway Mac but I think that's undeserved and this is actually one of my favorite computers it's small sleek and sturdy and although Apple abandoned it years ago it'll make a heck of a cool Linux machine so today let's see if we can breathe new life into this lovely little Machine by replacing the internal battery upgrading the SSD and installing the latest version of Ubuntu Linux so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoy going to Great Lengths to eke out more usable life out of your favorite old computers I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel for a long time the 11-inch MacBook Air was the entry-level Apple laptop released in 2010 to complement the existing 13-inch air the base specs were pretty paltry even for the time 999 dollars got to a 64 gig SSD and 2 gigs of non-upgradeable RAM paired with a 1.4 gigahertz Intel Core Duo but if you spend an extra 100 or so dollars things got a little more interesting four gigs of RAM 128 gig SSD and when you pair that with a battery that lasts for five or more hours and a honestly beautiful display Wake Up all In this incredibly small form factor you actually have quite the perfect Road Warrior my 11 inch MacBook Air here is the mid 2012 base model with 4 gigs of RAM and a dual core i5 and I bought it because well it was dirt cheap and I wanted a travel laptop that was small had good battery and uh wouldn't care too much if it got beat up or lost I think I paid 100 bucks for this thing like last year but Well turns out I absolutely adore this thing in fact that just flew down to VCF Southwest with this thing not only did it last all flight watching old Doctor Who episodes but it kept my libretto running during the show and well that really inspired me to show this air some love now that I'm back home with the new battery because this one only seems to last about three hours and a brand new 256 gigabyte OWC SSD because 64 gigs ain't cutting it and while we're at it I'm gonna satisfy my curiosity by running some benchmarks between Catalina here and Ubuntu to see if we take any performance hits or make any gains by switching to a modern Linux right after this word about today's sponsor Squarespace pretty fast beautiful and Rich web experience for your business or brand using squarespace's powerful all-in-one platform it's really easy to get started like sale wanted to build a website dedicated to the Misunderstood wonderful 11-inch MacBook Air I could build it in minutes with squarespace's new Next Generation fluid engine which features powerful drag and drop technology and enables you to customize every detail of your customers experience on desktop and mobile that's on top of optimizing for SEO managing a mailing list watching analytics and much more so check out squarespace.com actionretro today for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use code action retro to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain so after a quick Gander at iFixit turns out this thing is pretty easy to work on and uh yeah can you tell this is well loved been collecting stickers on here anyway a couple tiny screws of some sort and there we go the tiny wonder that is the 11 inch MacBook Air we've got our SSD here our big old battery here and I was surprised to learn it is not in fact glued in place it is screwed in place and can come off quite easily disconnect the battery connector there and look at that comes right out amazing and while we're at it we'll pop the SSD out goodbye 64 gigs in with 250. now this is a special connector here kind of I think proprietary for Apple even though it's nothing special about the drive itself as far as I know Apple just wanted to be apple and do Apple things and now our brand new uh no name Amazon battery which hopefully is okay but it does claim to be 35 watt hours which is the same as the original easy peasy and there we go all right well let's see if she powers on huzzah Okay so what we need to do here we're supposed to power cycle the battery so fully charge it and then fully discharge it down to absolute zero so that we get the best possible battery run time out of this thing so what I think I'm going to do is install Mac OS 1015 Catalina the last officially supported Mac OS on this five comma one MacBook Air but yeah I'm going to do this install charge it up discharge it overnight and we'll jump cut to hopefully a working system with a very nice battery okay so I've run this through two charge and discharge Cycles using a very rigorous and controlled totally normal battery rundown algorithm under which it seemed to last about four hours at least so that's an improvement and uh yeah it works just fine Mac OS Catalina installed just fine on this 250 gig SSD and I've run geekbench benchmarks and we got a score of 535 single core 1118 multi-core but you know this isn't The Benchmark that I'm super concerned with you know which benchmarks I'm really after we're gonna try to run the most modern Minecraft 1.20.1 and see what kind of frame rates we get not too shabby all right we're still loading into the world but we're already getting like 15 to 20 frames per second and now hitting 20 frames per second feeling pretty smooth yeah I'm gonna call this 17 frames per second that's the number I've seen the most let's try something a little bit different this is classic Cube how stupid security system preferences this is classic Cube it is a re-implementation of classic Minecraft in C plus plus which means it runs super fast even on extremely limited machines all right I'm gonna try to connect to the server I have running which is a public server by the way and yeah there is a lot of wacky stuff built in here which is going to make this a little more taxing actually I'm still hitting 59 frames per second just look at all this wild stuff people have built oh it's amazing all right let's bring this thing into the modern day and install Ubuntu 2304 and of course installing Ubuntu from a USB stick on an Intel Mac like this is super easy you just hold down option at startup with the USB drive with the installer connect it and it will come up as EFI boot on this lovely little gray screen and selecting that will take us right into the installer so we're in gnu grub here we can do try or install Ubuntu and everything on this machine should be supported out of the box no issues okay so we're booted into the live environment and it did take quite a long time to boot and uh yeah this is actually the second system problem detected I've seen but I'm just clicking ignore and we're just going to install Ubuntu and give it a fair shake once it's actually installed on the drive you know we can chalk that up to being in the live environment hopefully we'll find out together and again we are installing the full fat Ubuntu with gnome 3 desktop because honestly I really like gnome3 and yeah you can call me like a Linux Normie or something but I've installed and used plenty of other linices over the years like Arch Linux Manjaro Debian open Seuss and you know every distro under the sun but I always come back to Ubuntu because generally it just works and actually I don't think it sees the hard drive interesting I'm going to re-initialize the disk here and then just format it as extended four all right now we definitely do see the drive so let's go all right I've set up my name a nice secure password Dark theme of course and we're installing so I'll do a jump cut to when this is fully installed or if it fails okay well apparently these Cheapo Micro Center branded USB sticks from Amazon are garbage because I reflashed the image onto one of these PNY bad boys and it installed just fine none of those issues so yeah here we go Ubuntu 2304 installed and ready to use okay so I actually decided to live with this computer for about a day after the Ubuntu install just to see if there were any more issues like we saw with the live USB image on that Micro Center USB drive and there were none I did tons of stuff on this computer today web browsing a little bit of light development work I updated my bit bang.social Mastodon instance I watched a bunch of YouTube and didn't have a single problem with this thing and it seems to work great and specifically all of the functions work so keyboard brightness works as expected screen brightness works as expected Sound Works trackpad works wonderfully and feels great this thing is awesome and even better it feels smooth as all get out I mean My favorite way to use gnome 3 is hit the command key and type in something to open it and that works great it's so smooth even the animations I'm really surprised at how smooth they are in that event I took some geekbench benchmarks and boy was I surprised this thing under Linux scores significantly higher in both benchmarks single core and obviously multi-core check it out we scored 535 single core on Mac OS Catalina and 598 under Ubuntu 2304 you know a modern up-to-date operating system that's awesome I'm I'm shocked honestly I thought it was gonna score lower because of more overhead nope these numerical benchmarks they're good but you know what we're going to test next all right here we are in a similar biome to before and it feels pretty smooth let's see what our frames per second are oh 27 standing still look at that we're well above 20. yeah walking around we were hitting 24 frames per second down to the teens now as some of the world loads in ah 33 standing still 22 25 walking around this is significantly more frames per second let me give it some more same settings for the uh level of computer we have here all right Graphics fast render distance down a little bit smooth lighting off clouds fast we don't want it to look terrible now let's see what we've got oh yeah it already feels much smoother hey bunnies hello pet the bunny oh he doesn't like the pets all right let's see here what's our frame rate holy cow 52 frames per second standing still oh my God we're in the high 30s is 40 frames per second 36 not dipping below okay when I started to do stuff it dipped into the 20s but still this is a way better than expected frame rate for the level of computer we have here honestly but yeah let's see how fast classic Cube runs okay loaded back into the server and surprisingly we are getting the exact same frames per second 59 which is a little exact to be a coincidence so I don't know if this is trying to lock FPS at 60 perhaps I don't see anything look at all this cool stuff that people built here let me turn the fog off and uh let's fly up here Y2K look at this the Wolfenstein 3D logo that looks freaking incredible holy cow whoever did that thank you as you know my favorite game there's even stuff underground look I can go through this uh giant ethernet port and get down here where everyone has signed their name or at least a lot of people have what a cool collaborative work of art anyway I love this MacBook Air and wow would you look at that we were actually surprised by a positive result for once I'm really surprised that putting the latest version of Ubuntu on here performs better than Mac OS Catalina which you know was designed for this machine but I mean modern Mac OS is kind of bloated and Ubuntu has become a lot less bloated over the years so yeah I guess we shouldn't be that surprised good job Linux and I checked eBay you can still find these things for around a hundred dollars or so but in any event if you enjoyed this video I'd appreciate a thumbs up if you'd like to see more Shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to Alex Hoffman Andrew Nicholson April white Camilo noseda Chris algaretta Chris Biggs Chris Calderon Chris Nelson Control Alt Reese Daniel Hubbard Frodo Jedi Gaspar Heller George F rozanski Greg rockke Harris Brody James Fryman Jason Papas Jesse Ezell Justin Reed Lyle Truitt Matthew Crowell Paul Spencer Ryan Scott cederbaum Scott Thompson Sue Tech Tom Woodfin and Unknown Soldier 41 who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these videos possible

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 21,301

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: ipJceL253Fo

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023