The Desire to Install Mix on a 2016 MBP

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I have a Mac Book Pro that is dormant at the moment. I retired it because it became slow and unreliable. It’s a 2016 Mac Book Pro. This was never a great machine. I bought it cheaply because my good machine was stolen. I replaced the battery a few years ago and I was going to do the same, until I saw that it was retired by Apple. Without updates I didn’t see much point in paying 200 CHF for a battery for a machine that will run Linux when I can get a machine for that price.

I would have installed Nix this afternoon, if it wasn’t for the fact that I am in exile due to the first noisy Nyon Music Festival. We could hear the noise pollution from Caribana in Prangins. In a country that bans lawnmowers at lunch time and hoovers on Sunday it seems absurd that music festivals are allowed to make noise from 1800-0300 without consequences, year in, year out, for decades, except on Lockdown years.

Nix is different from other OSes because it is declarative. You have a text file where you specify your configuration, and it can be ported between machines with ease, over and over. Once one machine is configured you can easily migrate to a new machine and have the same experience.

If you make a mistake you can revert to a previous version that worked by rebooting and selecting the iteration that you desire.

The reason I want to install Nix on that machine specifically is that I am used to the keyboard layout. I have Nix on another machine but I believe that one of the USB ports fries drives that are connected. I’d rather use Nix on a machine that I trust.

It’s about the learning curve. If I try to use NIX as a daily driver it will become familiar, and with that familiarity will come fluency.


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