To start things off, this 2011 has been my daily driver since 2011 when I bought it to upgrade from the lower-end 2010 I purchased the year before. It had all the bells and whistles plus the early Retina display.
The hard drive itself gave out about two years later, so I swapped in one of those hybrid HDDs as SSDs were still up there in price. That gave me another three years before I was able to replace it with an actual Samsung SSD, a 1 TB 860 Evo, which has been doing its thing ever since. Sometime in 2020, the GPU began causing issues on account of just how hot it ran, this apparently being a notorious issue with the 2011 model specifically. After a complete disassembly, reflow of the GPU, and fresh thermal compound, we were back in business... for about two months.
I ended up getting lucky and a colleague of mine had a 2012 that he just wanted the data off of as to him it was just an *old* computer. It had the lower resolution display, but everything else about it was an upgrade. That evening, I backed up all the data to an external for him (it still had the older platter 2.5" HDD, somehow!) and proceeded to swap the 2012 logic board into my 2011.
OSX had already been feeling sluggish at the time, and I wasn't even able to get the latest and greatest anymore given the age of the hardware, so I knew it was time for something else. I'd actually been running bootcamp on the side with Windows 7 all those years and eventually just stuck with running 7 for a period of time. I'd always been a Linux fan, so I decided to jump right into distro hopping to find something I'd like.
I started off with Mint (still one of my favorites), then pure Debian, OpenSUSE, Kali (not as a daily driver, but for when I still did CyberForensics), Manjaro (Yuck!), and of course, Arch. Arch was probably the most annoying to install on this machine and not because setting it all up through the command line was hard. It was finding the correct drivers and tools to get everything to work correctly! I eventually did and ran that for the longest time. At some point, still unknown to me as to why, I went back to Mint. I think I was testing something for the folks over on the Mint Forums and I think I wanted to take another crack at installing Arch fresh.
When the time came, I needed my laptop back in working order, so I opted for EndeavourOS as it's Arch-based and unlike *another* Arch-based distro, the developers actively maintain it. Been a joy to use since! I even game on it through Steam from time to time.
TL;DR: 2011 MBP with 2012 logic board, distro hopped, always loved Arch and Mint, stuck with an Arch-based distro!
Now, for the obligatory neofetch!
The hard drive itself gave out about two years later, so I swapped in one of those hybrid HDDs as SSDs were still up there in price. That gave me another three years before I was able to replace it with an actual Samsung SSD, a 1 TB 860 Evo, which has been doing its thing ever since. Sometime in 2020, the GPU began causing issues on account of just how hot it ran, this apparently being a notorious issue with the 2011 model specifically. After a complete disassembly, reflow of the GPU, and fresh thermal compound, we were back in business... for about two months.
I ended up getting lucky and a colleague of mine had a 2012 that he just wanted the data off of as to him it was just an *old* computer. It had the lower resolution display, but everything else about it was an upgrade. That evening, I backed up all the data to an external for him (it still had the older platter 2.5" HDD, somehow!) and proceeded to swap the 2012 logic board into my 2011.
OSX had already been feeling sluggish at the time, and I wasn't even able to get the latest and greatest anymore given the age of the hardware, so I knew it was time for something else. I'd actually been running bootcamp on the side with Windows 7 all those years and eventually just stuck with running 7 for a period of time. I'd always been a Linux fan, so I decided to jump right into distro hopping to find something I'd like.
I started off with Mint (still one of my favorites), then pure Debian, OpenSUSE, Kali (not as a daily driver, but for when I still did CyberForensics), Manjaro (Yuck!), and of course, Arch. Arch was probably the most annoying to install on this machine and not because setting it all up through the command line was hard. It was finding the correct drivers and tools to get everything to work correctly! I eventually did and ran that for the longest time. At some point, still unknown to me as to why, I went back to Mint. I think I was testing something for the folks over on the Mint Forums and I think I wanted to take another crack at installing Arch fresh.
When the time came, I needed my laptop back in working order, so I opted for EndeavourOS as it's Arch-based and unlike *another* Arch-based distro, the developers actively maintain it. Been a joy to use since! I even game on it through Steam from time to time.
TL;DR: 2011 MBP with 2012 logic board, distro hopped, always loved Arch and Mint, stuck with an Arch-based distro!
Now, for the obligatory neofetch!
