I’m not a fan of VMs for older machines since they tend to perform poorly. And 4GB RAM wouldn’t be adequate for that. I’d suggest dual booting with a separate

I’m not a fan of VMs for older machines since they tend to perform poorly. And 4GB RAM wouldn’t be adequate for that. I’d suggest dual booting with a separate partition for Linux. You can also choose distros that have a lower hardware requirement and perform better on older machines (my first choice is Xubuntu, but there are others too). Make sure you still retain the macOS partition and installation (after resizing it down). There are tools like reFind [1] that can help you manage dual booting better (do read the extensive documentation and refer to it when needed). It goes without saying that you should have a full disk backup with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! before you venture into these. The experience on Linux may not be great out of the box (depending on your exact hardware). So I’d also suggest budgeting some time to iron out kinks and make it better. [1]: https://rodsbooks.com/refind/ https://rodsbooks.com/refind/