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Short story of my mother's MacBook Pro

Posted Updated
By Vincent Wutthisit Brabandt
2 min read

Specs

Story

There isn’t really much to say here really, this MacBook was bought for my mother by my father, but really I was the one who was using it most of the time, Back then I used to dual-boot macOS & Windows 10, but after I started using my father’s MacBook, It was returned to my mom, but she didn’t really use it much, but after my father’s/my main MacBook’s battery started bulging, I took this Mac for myself and started using it again.

I upgraded the system to macOS Sonoma and installed Ubuntu 23.10, and it worked like a charm (macOS Sonoma is kinda unoptimized for this old hardware though), I later re-pasted the CPU with Arctic MX-6 and upgraded the original 256 GB SSD to a WD Black SN770 1 TB.

It was my main laptop that I used when I did the 42 Wolfsburg’s Piscine program and did a lot of C coding and compiling with this MacBook.

Hardware-wise there aren’t many issues, the battery health level is around 84%, I do plan to replace it later on when I can afford it. Software-wise, Linux still lacks the driver for the MacBook’s built-in webcam, though I don’t really care for it much.

Gaming stuff on Linux (WIP)

Linux kernel 6.8.0 + Mesa 24.0.5

  • Minecraft 1.20.4 (+ Sodium) = ~30FPS (kinda playable)
  • Civilization V = ~ ~20-30FPS (Playable)
  • Civilization: Beyond Earth = ~10-25FPS (Unplayable)
  • Portal 2 = ~30-60FPS (Too stuttery)
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney = ~30-50FPS (Very playable)

Note: the FPS’s are really just estimates from my memory, please take it with a grain of salt (for now).

Because of Steam’s Proton, I’m able to play some games on this thing, sadly the Haswell iGPU has only incomplete Vulkan 1.2 support, I was able to start some games with Proton 7, but when entering the game it usual crashes, so whenever I play a game I usually play with the latest Proton (or Proton-GE) and forcing Proton to use WineD3D (DirectX to OpenGL) instead of the more efficient DXVK (DirectX to Vulkan).

I imagine that if full Vulkan support for the iGPU would ever be implemented or WineD3D would performance improve, maybe this MacBook could reach even higher potential than native Windows itself.

Computers, MacBooks
computers software hardware apple macbook linux gaming
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.