The cheap Chromebook I bought last year is starting to flake out. The keyboard is becoming less responsive; the left shift key has become particularly troublesome. I’m realizing that you can only expect so much mileage out of a $300 machine. It has been my daily driver for a year, so I think it has held up remarkably, all things considered.

I’m realizing that I need a backup machine though. I’m still not willing to buy a fancy new laptop, so I’m trying to make do with what I have. What I have is a 2012 MacBook Pro that has been sitting in a box under the bed for several years. This may not sound that appealing, and indeed you are right: running MacOS it is entirely unusable. But I put Ubuntu 22.04 on it, in an attempt to salvage some more useful years out of the hardware.

So far so good. The Ubuntu minimal install that I started with was a mistake (too minimal), so I reinstalled with the normal Ubuntu installation. I had to install some drivers to get the wireless working, but now it is a usable machine. I hope to report back once I’ve spent some time with it and can give a better assessment of how useful this setup is.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.