I should of posted over on here - someone could of had it. Oh well.
At this point, I’ve got this down to a science. I’m going to be writing up a guide for all of the packages I’ve used for this. I do need to do some more tweaking of the various key controls, but I now feel comfortable setting up Linux Mint XFCE with a MacOS interface and workflow on computers incompatile/too slow for dosdude1’s patchers. SSD and even 2GBs of RAM produces a fully usable experience on 2007s-2012s.
It has everything that I mentioned before and Japanese input ability, though I need to map it to the Japanese/English key on the keyboard. One big visual difference seems to be that only applications that have/need menus have menus. In MacOS everything produces a menu in the top bar, but here only apps that needs them do, with a few exceptions. Some like Firefox have that ability and somehow lost it from Linux Mint 19.3 to 20, but it doesn’t matter, because how often do you actually use it? I realised I never do. Files (the File Manager) and several other gnome pieces of software have button settings menus and no longer have tradition “file edit view” style menus, so those won’t exist. But like Firefox, you wouldn’t be using them anyway. It’s very similar to iOS/Android anyway, and I think a lot of MacOS (especially now in Big Sur, which I have beta tested and cannot stand) apps are going that way too.
All in all, I’ve decided to fully make the switch from MacOS to Linux after Catalina goes kaput. I’ll continue to use Apple hardware as long as it is supported by Linux and on Intel, but I think I’m totally out of Apple with the move to ARM. I’m not going to purchase any new Apple hardware because I want to upgrade and repair. So I’ll end up no doubt with aiming to use older MacBooks until they can’t keep up even for my needs, which I have to say, doesn’t seem to be any time soon.
I imagine in like 2025 or 2030 purchasing something very much like this, which feels like a modern MacBook Black. I don’t think it comes in a Japanese keyboard layout yet though, and I’d prefer something closer to the Mac keyboard layout at that.
But until then, I can save a lot of Macs from the dump or the recycling bin this way. Less e-waste, more useful Macs, everyone wins.
I’m with you… it occurred to me just a few days ago, that I no longer need a mac to deal with my phone and ipad, so why not linux. I too like XFCE but havent explored a lot, just enough to know that the latest linux Rawtherapee is excellent and Shotwell is perfect for photo management (wel, for my purposes anyway)… add Gimp and its all good. My 2010 is about to have a do-over. I do quite like the Thunar file manager though.
Amazing - do share how you’ve done this so others can benefit from your experience and wisdom!
I don’t know how @kionon does it, but I use an app called Balena Etcher. Works a treat. Maybe Kionon told me about it originally, I cant remember. But it does work. Also works to install to an external drive instead but grub leaves a mess in the bootloader.
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Well, I’ve done it… sacrificed the 2010 Macbook to Linux Mint 20 XFCE. Bit disappointed that Docky no longer seems to be part of the standard repository. I like Shotwell. It behaves a lot like iPhoto used to. I’m importing everything from the external drives and its being kind enough to dump duplicates, and to put everything in its correct place by month and year. RAWTherapee will do for edits for now
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Of course, theres always the issue of incompatible “upgrades” which destroy all your good work. The system recommended a video driver upgrade, and instead of staying with what was working… I said OK go ahead… and now I have nothin. I think I’ll get myself a different laptop. About to see if theres anything I can retrieve with whats on the Macbook but if I cant fix it easily… back to Mac on this hardware…
I used Balena etcher and installed Mint on a HP Steam today. Dear god is it slow! Passable maybe, but damn … Celeron N2840.
I’m back to High Sierra again. The shitty video driver meant I could not see a thing and because of it, Mint just refused to keep going. Oh well…
Which Mint did you use? I found that both Cinnamon and Mate stretched the friendship on the Macbook, so I use the XFCE flavour. About to have another go, to entertain myself on a Saturday 
I think I am going to d/l an older version too, Mint 19 seemed smoother, and Docky should be there. Like @Kionon I’m keen to have it look and work like a Mac and theres no reason it can’t. I’ve also decided that I don’t need more hardware. I almost never use the Macbook, may as well play with it.
I find the Nvidia drivers are rarely worth installing. The Nouveau driver (the open source Nvidia driver) usually is fine. The proprietary Nvidia drivers usually mess stuff up. Also wireless drivers for Broadcom are a mess, but this is Broadcom’s doing. The make minute adjustments to the cards within a large family and the firmware is slightly incompatible, so you install the recommended driver that driver manager suggests and it seems to work, you see the connections, but it fails to connect… Turns out you probably need to purge bcmwl (the close but no cigar driver) and install b43 (the good driver the driver manager won’t find) manually instead. From what I can understand, the driver manager is not sophisticated enough to be able to tell which is which, and Broadcom intentionally made this hard. So you have to do human work, find exactly the model you have (usually bcm94321mc, but there are many similar looking ones) and compare it to a written list showing which is actually really bcmwl and which is b43.
tl;dr when manufacturers won’t play nice with Linux, Linux developers are working partially in the dark, and this isn’t really Linux’s fault.
Docky can be added via command line, I am also annoyed it was removed from the Software Manager. Let me see if I can find the commands…
XFCE is the lightest yet most customisable I have found in all of my experimentation over the last two years. Mate is maybe second. After that Cinnamon. Gnome is eye candy and only really useful on newer systems. That said, I am so used to setting things up with my XFCE mods, that even on my Ryzen 7 Desktop system which could easily do Gnome (or Hackintosh), I still run Mint XFCE. If my Pro 3,1 was still functional, I’d probably have done the same to it.
I’ve got a 2010 MBP which was just donated to me (perfect condition except no battery, have ordered a new one) running Mojave perfectly fine with 8GBs of RAM and a Samsung 850 Evo. I bought two 480GB Crucial BX SSDs and warning, warning, warning, they suck. I noticed the 2009 and the 2010 Pros were running horribly with Catalina or Mojave, but my 2009 MacBook White Unibody was running Catalina just fine. Sure enough, as soon as I swapped out those Crucials for some other choices (Transcend and Samsung), there weren’t any issues. They were on sale and now I know why. They’re probably best for 2008s and older machines that can’t handle dosdude1’s patcher. And can only handle XFCE something or not.
@The_Hawk you might consider Mx Linux, it is even lighter than Mint XFCE. And I can recommend still lighter distros if necessary.
This laptop has been sitting in the cupboard since not long after it was purchased in 2015, even back then it was a total dog for modern internet with flash (which many of the sites my daighter wanted to go to used).
In many respects, it’s a solution looking for a problem. Over the years I’ve tried it for retro pi and, this time around, to run Octopi ontop of Mint for my 3D printer. While it was taxing the CPU updating and generally getting things set up it was definately a useable machine, just a little slow…
that was until I ran into config problems with OctoPi with missing packages and minor problems that honestly I just couldn’t be arsed solving. The intent was to replace a Raspberry Pi4 (which is probably more powerful 
) with this, solely so I could have a progress screen. So I can either use the stream just for it’s web browser when I’m printing, or I spend a few more $$ and just buy a small (like 3.5" - 7") display for the Pi itself and relegate the little HP back to the garage to wait for the next thing I try and use it for.
Made it impossible to even boot the system. I’ve learned my lesson now. Currently on Mint 19.2 and importing photos to Shotwell and making adjustments to the UI. I love that there is so much one can customise. My eyes seem to be failing at times, so larger fonts are a blessing. I use them in iOS but the MacOS options are lacking.
Might need those at some time in the future but for now if I upgrade, its already installed. I haven’t yet used it because I’ve not yet got round to placing the panel at the top of the screen. Other things first.
I can remember when Gnome was pretty basic, and I liked it that way. Its “improvements” are … tedious.
Oooh thanks! I was considering getting a larger SSD (I have an MX200 250GB which is OK though not startling)… and Samsung was on the radar but so were the BX models. Transcend I had not considered yet.
Noooo. Try Kionon’s suggestion
Performance is more than adequate for what I was looking at, this service runs happily on a Pi 3B+ (The Stream is running a 2C/2T Celeron N2840), but I can’t get a couple of things working on the Stream that I can on the Pi. I might still use it as a status monitor, but it seems silly to have two machines runnings (albeit low powered ones) in order to perform one task, especially when the second can be accomplished with anything from a 2x16 LCD display to a 3.5" colour touch enabled LCD… also that’s something I haven’t tinkered played with before.
Bit disappointed. I’ve dumped Docky for the moment. It placed a kind pf shadow band across the width of the screen above the dock (regardless of its size) which cut across everything, all open windows, etc. Annoying. 19.2. However I have pretty much everything else I want or need so am considering making it a permanent change. Naturally my Mini will remain MacOS, cannot give it up completely
You need to disable dock shadow in compositor in window manager tweaks.
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Thank you
And back to Mac. I like Mint, no doubt about it, but I want to use newer hardware and not have to fret so much that I might screw up the install by adding something it doesnt like. I think that I may, eventually, buy a new laptop with better specs than I currently have, and move on. As it were.
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Better with a big screen, methinks. I tried installing Ubuntu 20 on the Macbook, ended up with an unbootable machine. I suspect that it arbritrarily installed those graphic card updates which made the Mint install fall over when I did it. Also tried Mint 20 but then found not just Docky, but other things also missing from the software catalog. I need to be able to add some other software sources as I used to do but I forget where I found out what they were. Right now, I’m back on Mint 19 and quite happy with it. Considering installing on the Mini as well, for the larger screen.
[edit] Planning to have it on an external drive for the Mini, I’ll leave the mac install intact.
Make it Snow Leopard but also Dark Mode and fully compliant with 2021.
Linux Mint 20 running XFCE 4.16 on the 2008 MacBook White (Japan) 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM.
日本語もできますよ。
And… I’m done. Until 20.1 gets released.
Going back to my Utena wallpaper, and then I’m going to clone this so I can have the image for use on other systems. So I don’t need to go through the hassle of redoing it every single time. I am very happy with this for use on pre-Retina Intel Macs.
HiDPI isn’t quite worked out yet, so Retina support continues to elude me.
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