Short story of my mother's MacBook Pro
Specs
- Name: Apple MacBook Pro 13” 2013
- CPU: Intel Core i5-4258U (2 cores, 4 threads) @ 2.90 GHz
- iGPU: Intel Iris Graphics 5100
- Ram: 8GB DDR3L
- Disks: WD Black SN770 1TB
- OS: MacOS Sonoma + OpenCore & Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
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 used 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 repasted the CPU with Arctic MX-6 and upgraded the original 256GB SSD to a WD Black SN770 1TB.
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)
- Cvilization: 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 protential than native Windows itself.