Yesterday, I installed elementary OS on the 2008(!) MacBook the girl-friend is using.

Before, the machine was a stale piece of work, running an operating system from 2011 (Snow Leopard) and a browser from mid 2016 (Chrome 49) – the OS being the final version Apple supports for the hardware, the browser being the final version Google supports for the OS. (Yes, there were alternative browsers but the situation was not much different with these, either.)

Now she got an up-to-date combo of operating system and browser which will remain current with future updates and probably even will survive until the hardware (or at least a single essential part of it) simply refuses to function at all one fine day.

Not so surprisingly, a lot of the elementary OS configuration is pretty painful to conduct for yours truly, especially when trying to provide a frictionless transition from one OS flavour to another one.

It’s still Linux with all its challenges. However, this distro is already much better than the one I was trying out two or three years ago.

And: it being still Linux also means there is plenty of support out there in the forums and blogs of lovely people who got stuck with similar issues and many times were even able to solve those. They don’t hesitate to publish what they found out so the pain gets diminished and another little configuration step gets done.

All this is priceless, that’s why I decided to give some money in return to this shining project.

Of course, this is not an altruistic act I am performing here. In fact, I am bracing myself for switching from Apple hardware to something else – still plenty of time to decide. But the OS is going to be Linux, there is hardly any doubt. So I am happy to evaluate this distro as a potential candidate for myself. So far it is looking very good.

Relevant: Linux or Death (aka How to install Linux on a Mac).