(Part 1)

Can I use Linux to revive a decade-old MacBook Pro – and is it even worth trying?

A couple of months ago, I wrote up a piece about my attempts to get some extra value out of an ancient, creaky laptop by switching it from Windows 11 to Linux.

There were some hiccups – most notably, I’m still totally unable to get decent Wi-Fi speeds out of it, open to any suggestions on that score, comment below – but overall, the experience was decent, and it did show me a way to make the most out of technology purchases for as long as possible, even when big corporations have given up on the technology themselves, or it’s seen as “redundant”.

Which got me to thinking: Can I apply the same logic to the other side of the operating system fence, by way of converting a Mac into a Linux machine? Is a Linux MacBook even a feasible thing?

Such a wide variety in visual styles really shows off how flexible the engine has become!

The GNU project has announced the release of coreutils 9.9, a new stable version of the essential collection of basic file, shell, and text manipulation utilities that form the backbone of nearly every Linux and Unix-like system.

Among the most notable fixes, the cp command regains proper performance when handling transparently compressed files, a regression observed with OpenZFS and similar filesystems.

At the same time, the tail utility now correctly outputs the requested number of lines for non-small -n values, while unexpand no longer triggers heap buffer overflows when using the GNU-specific /NUM or +NUM formats with --tabs.

Other fixes address subtle behavioral issues in tools like numfmt, sort, and cksum, ensuring correct operation when working with various data encodings, locales, and compression setups.

The Rust Coreutils project, which aims to provide a full, modern Rust implementation of the GNU Core Utilities — the essential command-line tools found on every Linux and Unix-like operating system — has announced the release of version 0.4.

Notably, the project’s growing maturity has already led to real-world adoption in some Linux distros, such as Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka” and AerynOS, both of which now utilize Rust Coreutils for select system utilities.

Version 0.4 brings this release a step closer to achieving full GNU Coreutils compatibility. According to devs, the latest test results show 544 passing tests, up from 532 in the previous 0.3 release — an increase that raises total compatibility to 85.8%, while failures dropped from 68 to 56.