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I've been on a 2012 MacBook Pro for ~7 years. The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is punchy. The display is pre-retina, so not great, but I'm used to
by dhruvkar 8y ago
I've been on a 2012 MacBook Pro for ~7 years.
The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is punchy. The display is pre-retina, so not great, but I'm used to it. It's only noticeable when I see someone else's newer laptop display. Battery life is only ~1.5-2 hours, but I'm plugged in mostly.
First 5.5 years, I had macOS installed.
However, with OS updates, starting around Sierra (10.12), the machine became unusably slow.
Last 1.5 years, I've been running a mostly vanilla Lubuntu 16.04, upgraded to 18.04 recently.
Most things worked out of the box, it was still an adjustment. A few notes:
- Drag-and-drop isn't as nice. So I use an external mouse now.
- External displays have to be manually added after plugging in.
- It was hard to do without Spotlight for a while. Linux alternatives were too heavy for my machine.
- Mostly I deploy Python to Ubuntu Server, so keeping a similar dev environment is a breeze.
- Have not gotten bluetooth to work yet, but haven't tried very hard either.
- At the moment, I wouldn't go back to macOS or Windows. I'd keep making small dives into the linux ecosystem to solve my problems.
If I needed to buy a new laptop and didn't need any heavy-lifting, I'd look for one of these older, linux-tested, macbooks and install a lightweight linux distro.