I bought this laptop in late 2016. It’s still a good laptop (8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) and very light. However, I cannot use it with macOS anymore.

I previously blogged on installing Ubuntu on my old MacBook Air. Everything mainly went smoothly, except for the WiFi, which was not working during and after the installation, but it could be fixed by installing the proper module. The upgrade to Ubuntu 25.04 was almost fine: after the upgrade, the system did not boot anymore; I didn’t even get the Grub menu.

Ubuntu once again disappointed me. Time to wipe everything and go with my favorite Arch Linux distribution: EndeavourOS. In particular, “Mercury Neo”.

Installation

After having put the EndeavourOS ISO on a USB stick with Ventoy and inserted the USB stick, turn on the Mac and immediately press and hold the Option (⌥) key until you see the startup disk selection screen:

Select the entry corresponding to the USB and get to the Ventoy menu.

After some time, here’s the live system:

Did you notice the WiFi icon? Exactly! The WiFi has been automatically detected! Well done!

This is the WiFi card:

And we can see that the corresponding kernel module is part of the live system (of course, it will also be part of the installed system):

I changed the keyboard layout for an easier installation.

Before starting the installation, I use the Welcome menu to update Arch and EndeavourOS mirrors, of course, after connecting to the WiFi.

Before going on, everything seemed to work: touchpad, keyboard light, volume, brightness, though function keys were inverted. We’ll fix that later.

Let’s start the installation, choosing the “Online” method:

Then, the installation, based on Calamares, is the standard one, showing a few dialogs to select some configurations:

I will install KDE:

I also select as additional packages the LTS kernel and the printing packages:

As usual, I choose Grub as the bootloader:

I choose to wipe everything, select BTRFS as the file system, and also “Swap with hibernation”:

Let’s review everything and choose “Install”:

The installation takes a few minutes. Time to restart:

The installed system

Here we are:

Here are some screenshots of the good-looking KDE desktop:

And, of course, the fastfetch output in all its glory:

Configuration

As already stressed, unlike Ubuntu, there’s no need to fix any WiFi problem: it works out of the box!

Then, let’s fix the function keys, which are inverted (so, to have F1, you’d have to press “Fn F1”, which is not ideal). You can try:

If it works, change this permanently:

Concerning hibernation (selected during the installation), it does work; however, there’s a big problem: the system does not shut down, it reboots. Upon rebooting, it effectively resumes from hibernation, but as it is, it’s rather useless. I still have not figured out how to fix that.

Another thing not working is the webcam.

This is the device:

Maybe it’s just a matter of installing the corresponding packages, but I haven’t investigated further yet.

Everything else works smoothly, as I have already said (including touchpad gestures in KDE).

Final thoughts

The laptop works great with EndeavourOS, even better than with Ubuntu. Everything is smooth and reactive. Even more than with the original old macOS operating system.

I noted that concerning sleep, the default configuration already uses the more power-saving setting:

Power consumption also works fine after installing the powertop package (running that with the “auto-tune” setting) and setting the power profile to “Power Saver” from the KDE menu. MacOS probably used to have better power consumption, but this one is acceptable.

It was a nice decision to put Linux on this laptop, even more so with EndeavourOS instead of Ubuntu! 🙂