Reviving My Beloved MacBook Pro 2010 with OpenCore Legacy Patcher and Linux Mint 21

I've always had a special connection with my MacBook Pro 2010. It’s not just any laptop—it’s a device I built myself years ago by combining two broken MacBook Pros I bought on eBay. Something you can no longer easily do so nowadays since the MacBooks have become way smaller, thinner and everything is more or less glued together. The final result was a fully functional machine with a pristine appearance, free from major scratches. Despite its age, it still works just as it did on day one. When I first bought it, it even came in its original box, complete with all the macOS installation DVDs.

Over time, however, the macOS updates became fewer and fewer. And High Sierra was the last officially supported macOS operating system, which has been end-of-life for ages. A new macOS version was urgently needed to be able to use it securely. Since no new macOS versions were available for the MacBook Pro 2010, I turned to OpenCore Legacy Patcher and installed the latest macOS Sequoia. I have to say the whole process was very easy. All I needed was a large external drive. I used an old SATA SSD with a USB converter that I had lying around. However, given the age of the MacBook Pro, Sequoia didn’t run very well. So, I switched to macOS Ventura, which runs pretty smoothly and offers a much better experience.

Bringing It Back to Life

Determined to extend the life of my MacBook Pro, I decided to make some upgrades:

• Installed a new battery from iFixit (~80€)
• Swapped in a 256GB SSD that I had lying around

With OpenCore Legacy Patcher, I managed to install macOS Ventura, and surprisingly, it runs very well on the MacBook. The system feels smooth and responsive, making the machine completely usable again.

Enter Linux Mint 21

While macOS Ventura worked well, I was also looking for a dedicated Linux laptop. That’s when I decided to install Linux Mint 21 on the MacBook. It's now called a MintBook. 😄Basically all you need to do is carve out some free space of your MacOS and create two partitions. One for Linux Mint and one for swap. Put the Linux Mint 21 ISO on USB, boot from it, install and GO. The results? Even better performance! Linux Mint runs exceptionally well on this hardware, making it the perfect match for my needs.

Performance

Here are some numbers to give you and idea:

Just idling on the desktop, Firefox two tabs open:

root@oliver-MintBookPro:~# uptime
 18:02:16 up 35 min,  2 users,  load average: 0,23, 0,62, 0,33
root@oliver-MintBookPro:~# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            5668        1623        3522          21         769        4045
Swap:           5057           0        5057

Playing YouTube:

root@oliver-MintBookPro:~# uptime
 18:03:54 up 36 min,  2 users,  load average: 2,02, 1,07, 0,52
root@oliver-MintBookPro:~# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            5668        2062        3004          45         873        3605
Swap:           5057           0        5057

Even the keyboard hotkeys like backlight dimming, screen brightness, play/pause, sound function perfectly right out of the box. Pretty impressive! Also the lovely trackpad works like a charm. 🤩

Only thing that was a bit tricky was to get the WiFi working. Seems that the MacBook Pro uses a Broadcom adapter that has a proprietary driver. My first attempt was to just install the driver over the GUI, but that didn't work. I was not shown any adapter in the network connections. A quick google revealed a simple solution:

sudo apt-get purge bcmwl-kernel-source broadcom-sta-common broadcom-sta-source && sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer
sudo modprobe b43
sudo apt remove broadcom-sta-dkms
sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf
reboot

While the WiFi is not really blazing fast, I measured a little over 20Mbps, the MacBook Pro features a 1Gbps RJ45 network port. Awesome given that it is 15 year s old. Accessing my SMB fileshares on Truenas works without any issues. I measured a little over 70MBps.

To be honest I never really used Linux with a GUI in my whole life. That is about to change now. I remember what a hassle it was back in the days to do simple things like accessing network shares or having to install several drivers to get various devices working.

Will it run Crysis???

YES. But of course, not natively on the MacBook Pro. Instead, I was able to install Moonlight, an open-source game streaming client that allows you to stream games from a PC with an NVIDIA GPU using NVIDIA GameStream. Originally designed for the NVIDIA Shield, Moonlight lets you play high-performance games on a variety of devices, including Linux, macOS, Android, and even the Raspberry Pi.

I installed Moonlight via snap. However, since Linux Mint 21 disables snap by default, I first had to enable it:

sudo mv /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref ~/Documents/nosnap.backup
sudo apt install snapd

Next we install moonlight:

sudo snap install moonlight

Running Moonlight was straightforward—I connected to my Windows PC with an RTX 2080 Ti. Amazing how simple this works.

At startup, Moonlight warned about a missing H.264 decoder. The old NVIDIA GeForce 320M in the MacBook Pro doesn’t have hardware decoding for H.264, but it still worked fine. The maximum resolution I could achieve was 720p, but the game ran smoothly. It's incredible what this open-source software can do!

I tested it over both WiFi and Ethernet. While both worked, I highly recommend using a wired connection for the best experience.

Was It Worth It?

At first, I wasn’t sure if investing in a new battery was worth it. Spending 80€ on such an old machine felt like a gamble. But now, after seeing how well both macOS Ventura and Linux Mint perform, I can confidently say that it was money well spent. Also it was and still is a lot of fun to experience the possibilities. Especially Moonlight was something that I wanted to test at some stage.

Of course, the MintBook Pro is not my daily driver, but I can now switch it on again at any time and use it safely. The battery only lasts a little over 2-3 hours, but that was to be expected.

This entire process reinforced why I love this machine—it’s reliable, well-built, and still relevant over a decade later. I’m thrilled that I could breathe new life into it and keep it running for (hopefully) years to come!