The old MacBook Air I'd been running k8s on had become a bit problematic. The battery's gone very bad, and newer versions of macOS have begun to run very poorly on it. After macOS Tahoe, Apple's ending support for these old Intel Macs completely too. Time to make a change!
It makes sense to deal with the battery later once we've shown we can save the rest of the hardware, so step one was to install Ubuntu. Harder than expected!
First thing I did was to download ubuntu-25.04-desktop-amd64.iso. This boots to GRUB, where you get these four options.
- Try or Install Ubuntu
- Ubuntu (safe graphics)
- Boot from next volume
- UEFI Firmware Settings
Couldn't get further than this, though. Options 1 and 2 both just led to a black screen of death. Through Googling I found various forum posts suggesting different boot flags to try. None of that helped either.
I've been away from desktop Linux for about 15 years and I'm very out of date with the modern troubleshooting techniques. One new thing I learned this time is that YouTube videos have become a key source of information for this kind of thing. In a video by someone called "Level 2 Jeff" titled Resurrecting my ancient MacBook Air with Ubuntu Linux I saw the exact same problem resolved by booting from an older Ubuntu ISO.
Starting again with ubuntu-20.04.6-desktop-amd64.iso and choosing Ubuntu (safe graphics) proved successful. From there, it was a matter of following the upgrade instructions to upgrade to the latest version.
So far so good! And Linux looks a lot better than I remember. With any luck this could be the first step in a journey out of a dependence on proprietary American tech!