One or two years ago, I have tried to run a recent macOS on a Macbook air 11" from 2011, 4GB of ram, it was just unbearable, any actions would take seconds, I wonder if it is still problematic.

8 GB RAM is the baseline for modern macOS. It really doesn’t like being forced to do with less, even if the 4 gb macbooks are not that old (4 gb airs were sold until 2016).

People keep nagging apple to up the baseline RAM from 8 to 12 or 16 on the new machines, but given how the 4 to 8 jump played out it would probably quickly make that vast sea of soldered 8 gb machines incapable of running newer macOS versions well.

Personally I think they run really well on modern OS, I've got Sonoma running well on my 2012 and 2013 MBPs.

Depends which version you tried to run, the MacBooks without metal graphics are really bad on modern OSes, but they have made a lot of progress with the patches.

For my macbook pro 13" late 2011 I've pick manjaro with gnome and with OpenCore Legacy Patcher I managed to squeeze macos 13.5 on in.

While manjaro makes the machine relatively useful for the current day - for really simple tasks that is, the 13.5 misses much especially with low amount of ram. But worse thing is that this device comes with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and some stuff just simply won't load like Maps because this GPU isn't supported by Metal API.

In the past I tried Lubuntu on eMac G4 with 800mhz PPC - it was a rather painful experience. So I replaced it with 10.4 and with help of Macintosh Garden slapped additionally os 9.2.2 for for some dualboot retro fun

I’m running Manjaro on a late 2012 MacBook Pro, it’s running flawlessly.

The only initial issue I had was that I had to configurate the broadcom WiFi driver manually. Super easy after some googling for the more technically interested person… But nothing I would expect the general person to solve without frustration.

8gb RAM, 125gb SSD. 1xBattery replacement.

It does not run IDE’s like ST32 (based on Eclipse) and OneNote via Firefox smoothly simultaneously. But everything else so far has worked flawlessly. I use it every day and have done so since the beginning of this fall.

Edit: Call me a script kid all you want, for this particular laptop it’s just more convenient for me to run Manjaro rather than Arch right of the bat. But I guess I could eventually set up a shared partition for storage and an individual partition for each OS.

Lack of wifi support for any given distro I’m testing out is an instant rollback for me. I just don’t have the time or patience anymore. It has always been a problem.

Interesting, I run Webstorm for larger JS projects on Monterey on my 2012 Air. 4gb of ram w/ SSD. Little slow to start but I have fixed plenty of production bugs on the go with that thing before I retired it last year and got an X1 Carbon :)

Now that you mention it, I do recall issues with the WiFi on my model too. IIRC after one of bigger releases I had to manually install some driver package from AUR because existing driver was for whatever reasons removed.

Same here with my recent (free!) acquisition, a mid-2012 unibody Pro, when I installed Solus on it. However, when I booted it with MX initially, it automagically set up the wifi driver.

> Or, the MacBook and MacBook Air can run newer macOS using OpenCore Legacy:

This project is amazing. I just installed Ventura on an Apple Mac mini "Core i7" 2.7 (Mid-2011, “Macmini5,2”). The process went smoothly once I figured out that I needed another old Intel Mac to create the USB boot volume for an even older Intel Mac.

I'm glad you posted this info but this is where I'm stuck.

My mbp 2015 is the only Intel device I have Available and the main position died...so my only working position is windows and I'm running into issues getting into recovery. Even internet recovery wont work :/.

Yeah, that bit's frustrating if you don't have access to an Intel Mac. And I had the same experience as you with Apple's Internet Recovery — I must've tried it 20 times without success, and as far as I can tell the problem is Apple's.

LMK if I can send you a DMG with an OpenCore-enabled Yosemite installer on it. I believe I just need to know your exact model, which you can look at up at https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/. (I temporarily put my email in my HN profile.)

Emailed you, much appreciated!!

OpenCore also simplifies running Linux on the Apple EFI 1.1 environment.

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Multiboot/oc/linux.html#...

It’s such a cool project.

> The iMac still run Lion ...

Pity about the lack of security updates in the intervening years.