Linux on Macbook Air

2026-03-20

I installed Linux Mint on an old Macbook Air for a relative, here are some notes.

Target machine

Issues

The disk is not visible by default. I needed to enter the option intel_iommu=off in grub as described on super user. The installer did not have good error handling for this and quit with TypeError: "NoneType" object is not subscriptable.

The Broadcom wifi chip needed a proprietary driver. I was happy to find out that the driver can be installed from the install USB, so that was pretty easy. However the driver does not play nice with the current kernel - 6.171 - and I had to pin the kernel to 6.142.

The webcam was more of a mess; cheese couldn't find a device. Turns out "Macbook Air Facetime HD camera" needed a driver too. The driver can be found on github but it took quite a bit of finagling to get it to work.

Enhancements

For a long time Mac user, these helped make the new OS feel more familiar.

Albert, a launcher which looks similar to spotlight. I enabled: Applications, files and system plugins. Had to play around a little with the indexing allow and disallow lists.

Moving the taskbar to the top is an easy little win...

It's 2026, so I described everything I did to the user's Claude. There are no issues yet but that should pay dividends.

Happy Surprises

Microphone, bluetooth, closing the lid / suspend and brightness, volume and backlight keys all worked well out of the box. In fact, wifi is working better now than it did on Mac OS where it couldn't connect to hotspot.

Before the install, the laptop barely worked (opening a browser took ~30 seconds) and felt outdated, now it feels snappy and modern. Maybe I'll update in 6 months to see how it's holding up.

  1. I discovered this myself but it's online too ↩

  2. bash sudo apt-mark hold \ linux-generic \ linux-image-generic \ linux-headers-generic \ linux-image-6.14.0-37-generic \ linux-headers-6.14.0-37-generic ↩