I had just upgraded all the Macs in the house to Apple Silicon models and was getting around to selling off the last Intel iMac (a 2020 vintage 10 core i9) when—
AI bros crash the door: hey homie I hear you like memory and SSDs— *Stand and deliver!*
Me, side-eying the dust-covered 128Gb RAM iMac— you get The Linux now.
@cstross Got one of the last Intel MacBook Pros flying around. To sell or to Linux it? Then again I did Linux my old Titanium G4 laptops back in the days with Gentoo (when MacOS X was a steaming pile of 💩) but I don’t really fancy two weeks of full on compilation to end up with Gnome desktop. It worked, yes, but not the most efficient exercise on the planet I guess…. 🤷♂️
@cstross hopefully you have a better time getting Linux on there than me. I have a 2018 MBP and can’t get WiFi working. Seems it’s just never going to work, annoyingly. macOS runs like a dog on it now (and old version). Best of luck!
Which distro shall The Linux be?
@oldcoder No idea yet: might be better to go for one of the BSDs, specifically to avoid systemd and wayland and other Microsoft-oid infections. (I have UNIX history and don't like the new-fangled bullshit.)
@cstross Alpine Linux is systemd-free and has a very small attack surface, but is not ideal as a desktop distribution, but it's the closest thing you will get to a BSD experience on Linux. I myself recently switched from macOS to Linux due to creeping enshittification (cachyOS and Ubbuntu on the desktops/laptops, Alpine on the servers), but of course you won't have Scrivener there unless you want to fiddle with WINE or virtualized Windows.
@cstross @oldcoder in fact, I wrote that up last year: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200
@rcarmo @cstross @oldcoder I recently converted my old 2012 Retina MacBook Pro cllecting dust to Ubuntu (it had previously been my daughter's zoom-school computer during COVID), and gave it away because at my last inventory I have at least 26 computers, which seems a tad excessive. The guy who picked it up from FreeCycle didn't bat an eye at the mention of Linux, said he was getting it for his own daughter to do school work.
@fazalmajid @rcarmo @oldcoder I rilly rilly need to get a ladder out and carefully get the 1999 Mac G4 Cube down off the top of the bookcase, find the monitor and speakers, and reassemble it. It ran Snow Leopard fine last time I lowered it up! 450MHz, baby, feel the raw power!
You have UNIX history? I started with V6 at U.C. Berkeley in 1976. I have a few contributions in the BSD fortunes file.
The decision to avoid systemd and Wayland is sensible. There are serious issues with both and they represent wrong turns in the history of Linux.
There are standard Linux distros that might work for your purposes. Devuan comes to mind. Devuan eschews systemd and prioritizes X11/Xorg over Wayland. And it's essentially Debian, so everything important runs.
If you're an old UNIX hand, Slackware might be the AINeko's meow. Slackware was my first Linux distro in the early 1990s. For all intents and purposes, it was UNIX. I actually migrated my company [a software development firm] from SunOS and Solaris boxes to Slackware running on 486s.
Today, Slackware uses a BSD-like init system [instead of systemd] and treats X11/Xorg as the default. Wayland is supported as an alternative.
PCLinuxOS and Void Linux are two other options. However, I haven't tried those distros.
For what it's worth, my own Linux distro [30 years old this year] eschews both systemd and Wayland except for the minimum core Wayland libraries required to compile some packages.
On cloud servers, I run #Devuan because host dedis are able to boot it. From there, on the dedis, I run my own distro in an ultra-light container.
If you prefer a light Linux experience, you're far from alone. Most developers that I know directly do as well.
In a humorous note, one of my students once asked me to name the smallest thing in the Universe. "Planck's Constant", I replied. It turned out that he wanted to create the smallest distro possible. Thus was born Planck Linux.
I think that that distro fit on one floppy. Note: It isn't online any longer as the developer is presently working on a distro that is intended to be slightly larger.
In regular FOSS now, it's considered acceptable to have terminal emulators that require hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
For the sake of dancing icons and such, too, desktops now pile layer upon layer of unnecessary software until the result resembles the 100-layer dip shown in the attached screenshot. The end result isn't small or fast.
I'm not able to fathom the mindset.
My desktop core has taskbar, workspaces, systray, alt-tab, launch buttons, live dockapps, live wallpaper, start button, multiple terminal options, volume control, offline Wikipedia, and single-instance support. Does anybody truly need more? Additionally, response times even on a decade-old laptop are, blink, you're there.
The punchline is that the core consists of a single fast executable of about 300 KB plus a few support executables and scripts. KB and not MB.
That is how it's done.
My advice to people is to seek the light. A light Linux, that is. BSD is fine, too, but #Linux distros might be more complete and come with larger communities.
@oldcoder Slackware was my first linux distro too. (Back when I was still working at SCO. Back when SCO was a UNIX VAR, not a brain-eating litigation zombie.) I do not, however, have as much history with UNIX as you evidently do!
@oldcoder To understand the SCO lawsuit you have to look back to the DR lawsuit against Microsoft (for hobbling Windows 95 so it wouldn't run on top of DR-DOS). They won big, but only after DR and their IP had been bought by Caldera, then an also-ran Linux distributor.
The lawyers at Caldera then bought the SCO IP (they thought) and took aim at IBM because that *always* ends well and they thought "Microsoft, IBM, what's the difference?" (The rest of SCO ended up being eaten by Borland AIUI.)
Jernej:
Yes. But the distros that I listed are probably closer to out of the box support for Mr. Stross's purposes.
One of my associates is the lead for Adélie Linux, which is similar to Alpine. Another was one of the early leads for Gentoo. So I have some familiarity with these distros.
Adélie is probably better than Alpine for general use. It's a general-purpose distro with a focus on usability, stability, and broad hardware compatibility.
In an odd note, I see pages on the Web which suggest that Adélie is the love child of Alpine and Gentoo. I didn't know that.
But Mr. Stross is likely seeking a distro that is ready to go for his purposes and all three of these distros will require some work to set up.
If you're familiar with one of the three distros and could offer a recipe to meet the desired specifications, that might be a good option.
Note: I don't use recipes myself because my distro is monolithic. I put everything, including distro source code, on an SSD and boot that. It's nice not to need to worry about a laptop breaking. If it does, move the SSD to a new laptop and, presto, you're back and good as ever.
@oldcoder Wrong on all counts about me. (I used to be Computer Shopper UK's linux columnist for many years, but for the past two decades I've been a full-time novelist and I rely on @ScrivenerApp to earn my living, which adds its own level of pain: I'm looking back at UNIXen in anticipation of Apple's inevitable rapid enshittification after Tim Cook retires.)
@jernej__s @oldcoder I want KDE 3.5.x as well. Probably via Trinity Desktop Environment.
@cstross It could cause someone to refactor a program to run efficiently. If they have the source code and talent.
Such dreams ;)
