2012 Macbook Air APFS Making bootable usb install drive

I’m in the 4th day after installing Linux Mint on my 2012 MB Air. I enjoyed troubleshooting and constantly fixing the old window virus machines and got pretty good at it. It was a passion i guess. The i got sick of it and got a mac. Never looked back…until now. I worked 20 years in the belly of the beast, Silicon Valley and spent some time with a certain virtualization company working for the Advanced Technology Group as well as the Monitor group… Need a hand Jeff?? Have your people call my people.

Anyways, I played with linux VM’s back in the day and am amazed now with how far its come. 12 years ago, it was never good enough for me to switch from OSX.

Now it is.

I downloaded the .iso of mint… but then noticed apple changed their filesystem in some update to APFS. Making a boot disk was a pain…but ebay wasnt! $15 and i had one in 2 days.

Needed a boot manager…found rEFind. Works like a champ.

Booted to the new Linux Mint usb and installed.

Everything worked outta the box.

The change was not without some effort, but the effort was minimal. Using a Duck search will get you the info you need. I’m proud to have made up “duck search” BTW.

The net net is installing on ole Macs is in no way terrifying.

It was good before in the cage. But now its actually FREE!

4 Likes