Two 2012 Mac Minis with the rubber feet off exposing the inside.
Two Mac minis dating from 2012 are pictured above. The one on the left has an Intel i5 processor and it was running happily with an installation of Linux Mint. The machine on the right is a new acquisition. It is a server version of the Mac mini and it has an Intel i7 processor in it and two hard drives. I opted to go with the more powerful processor and the machine on the right, not as a server, but as my everyday machine.
The server version had a faulty hard drive so a little surgery was necessary. I pulled the bad drive and replaced it with a Sandisk SSD I had lying around. I wiped the mechanical drive and installed the latest version of Linux Mint on it making it my brand new Mac Minty.
Mac Minty in a VESA mount bolted to the back of a monitor.
On the SSD, I did a fresh install of Catalina which is the latest Mac operating system that 2012 will take without hacks. Catalina will run my beloved Affinity 2.0 Suite as well as Acorn which is an image editing alternative to Photoshop which I got years ago. It has some terrific filters that I like to hearken back to.
This rig won’t run my boxed Adobe software. I will have to rely on my older Macs for that.
One way or the other, that old Adobe Suite is going to come into play which will be the subject of future posts. We made out perfectly fine when these old computers and the software installed on them were new. We survived and thrived. It will be interesting to see what we can accomplish with the old gear. I’m really curious to see Tina take a crack at her Friday Five series with software that is going on 18 years old.
I have my Mac Minty for everyday computing, and I am a restart away from booting into Catalina with my Affinity suite and my Postscript fonts which suit me just fine.
