I have a number of fairly elderly macs. The hardware is fine, if a little old, and perfectly capable. Unfortunately, the most recent version of macos that runs on them is High Sierra, released in 2017, and last patched in 2020. This means that it lacks the security fixes issued by Apple since then, things necessary to block unwanted visitors. I dislike unwanted visitors, many make advertisers appear ethical.

an elderly DS

I want to keep using these macs. They’re perfectly good as computers; indeed, I upgraded the mac mini hardware early last year to keep them performant. This means I have to replace High Sierra with something contemporary, something not quite so insecure.

The machines to be updated are a 2011 mac mini, a 2011 macbook air, & a 2009 imac. The obvious way forward is to use linux, but that means selecting an appropriate distribution. Furthermore, I use the mini as a server, where I use the imac as a workstation, so they may benefit from different flavours of linux.

After some fairly minimal online research, and some arsing around, I found the following flavours happily installed & worked on bare hardware:

  • mint, using gnome;
  • proxmox, using HTML, designed to be a virtual host, which delightfully will run all recent versions of Windows, including mostly importantly 2022;
  • xubuntu, using xfce.

I was disappointed to have installation problems with lubuntu. I failed to test many other flavours.

I decided I wanted the same flavour on client machines, and another flavour on servers. I tried both mint and xubuntu out, and found I simply preferred xfce (xubuntu) over gnome (mint). They both seemed to be perfectly good, I just preferred xfce. So I’ve installed xubuntu on the workstations.

I did consider using OpenBSD, but that required a USB thumb drive, and I’m very sure indeed I’d have problems with that on the air. I’m simply too incompetent/unlucky/careless not to lose the thumb drive when I really really needed it. This knocks out OpenBSD on the imac too, since I want the same OS on both systems.

I’ve been running proxmox on the mini for a while now, and it seems to do what it says on the tin. The mini used to act as file servers for my ISO archive, and they still do, although now those files are served by a guest Windows 2022 server running under proxmox (I still subscribe to MSDN, or whatever it’s called this week).

an elderly DS

There is one annoyance, and this applies to all the macs, although I’m going to talk about proxmox on the mini.

One of the great sillinesses of macs is that they cannot be set up to reliably boot on power up. There are lots of boxes you can tick in lots of settings in macos, but none work properly. The problem is that a mac will power up, if told so, if it lost power when it was running or when it was sleeping, but, unlike a PC, it will not power up if it lost power after it was turned off. Users have to remember to leave it in sleep mode before they power off, rather than shutting down, despite the latter being less wasteful. Depending on the user remembering to do the right thing, even when I’m the user, is hopeless for remote management of computers.

Proxmox is worse that macos, but at least it’s consistent. You can put the mac to sleep, power the machine off, turn the electricity off, turn it back on, and nothing happens. I intend to explore this one further, and I sense something might be possible. Remote power up is essential to me when I’m travelling.

One other oddity about proxmox is that, despite being a virtual server running on a mac, it cannot host macos. This isn’t actually a problem for me; I’d only install a guest if it can be patched to contemporary security standards, and such versions of macos cannot run on the hardware, so I wouldn’t install a macos guest anyway.

The final minor annoyance is a consequence of my decision to switch my ISO archive from macos to windows server running as a guest. The disk formats are sufficiently different to cause the occasional glitch. There can be issues about incompatible file names, and the like. I just have to remember to zip the archive files before I convert them. This is my decision, it has nothing to do with proxmox per se. If I had considered that a serious issue, I’d have installed a unix guest.

Anyway, beyond that, so far, everything looks good.