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Member

From: U.K.

Registered: 2016-01-28

Posts: 1,333

Aquarius Plasma on Intel Macbook Air

I was recently given a 2014 Macbook Air (El Capitain) 125/4Gb - which was nice. One owner, low mileage and bags of battery life left.

It seemed only natural to try dropping Q4OS onto it as there was no way forward with MACOS in a 4gb machine - at least not one I particularly want to follow as I'm no real fan of it in the first place. However I do know from long experience that Apple hardware is good - if occasionally I little 'idiosyncratic'.

So, boot off USB - hmmmm - no wifi - it's a BCM3640. No ethernet port - bother! Amazon please supply a usb>ethernet adapter and a thunderbolt>HDMI while you're at it for external monitor.

That's better. Zapped the drive and then install Plasma, all good.
Install wl driver - we've got wifi.
FacetimeHD Camera was a little more fun till I found https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd/wi … -on-debian and all worked perfectly.

OK I know the keyboard is annoying on MACs. No way of setting the Fn keys to operate properly (i.e. F action first then Fn to provide other controls, Command Backspace to delete... Really??? and so on.

BUT the trackpad is a treasure and more than makes up for it, the display is of course good and build quality excellent - and best of all it's SILENT!!!

It seemed only natural to find a nice theme to go with the hardware Apple Catalina works well and seems a good fit with just a little tweaking.

After switching off a few un-needed services RAM use at tickover is around the 650 mb range which is no worse than XFCE and way better than Mint/Cinnamon.

crosscourt

Member

From: Wash DC

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,872

Website

Re: Aquarius Plasma on Intel Macbook Air

Love it when you can get a system thats been with one owner with low usage. Ive got a lot of hardware that was given to me like that and all of it is in use right now. Plasma runs a lot better than people think with 4gb of memory or less and Q4OS at least for me had a slightly lower resource usage than many other KDE based distros.

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Q4OS Aquarius 5.x KDE   Dell Inspiron 3670  i5 8600, GTX 1660 Super, 32gb, 2tb NVME SSD