Minting an iMac

Sadly, Apple has retired my 2012 iMac, after 10 years. The iMac is still working, has a decent CPU and memory and a nice display, albeit not retina, so the retirement does feel somewhat premature to me. Apple puts things out to pasture far too quickly in my opinion, Microsoft is a lot better in this regard, and Linux is top.

Due to concerns about the aging MacOS version on the machine, it limits my application upgrade path, how long will developers keep compiling for older systems 2 or 3 versions, maybe, often they want the latest and greatest version immediately, who can blame them. Add that to the fact that Apple/Nvidia haven’t provided GPU/CUDA drivers for years, I have decided to retire Apple from my old iMac and switch it over to Linux Mint.

It fits with my general direction, vis-à-vis software and my dislike of subscriptions, renting software, and my preference for FOSS.¹ I have started to take Open Source tools more seriously as a replacement to commercial, this has been spurred on by future accessibility and reliability. Plus companies selling out to the man.

I have the first part done, the machine is running Linux Mint and it looks really nice. I have got some tweaking to do, the old mac had a piggybacked drive set up which I doubt I can replicate, so will have to use the SSD part as the boot and Mechanical part as the storage for everything else. How hard can it be…