Re-purposing a 5k iMac 2014 with a broken install of iOS after the previous owner was tinkering with it via the terminal?!?!?! (unknown reasons but understandable from this particular friend and the story grows to the day)

These series of iMacs were offered with a Fusion Drive in 1, 2 and 3 TB. The drives have a solid state flash portion that iOS is able to use for quick storage of often used items and applications. This was an amazing feature at its time however was troublesome for breaking installs and requiring an online install of iOS due to the nature of setting up the Fusion Drive correctly so that iOS is able to move data freely across the two portions of the drive, which are separately addressed in the io-hardware numbering. Great, a work around to get it up and running, however they are discontinuing the support for it with High Sierra as the highest iOS that it will support from Apple?!?!

Install Linux? Sure, but what flavor. The general conciseness on the internet among several discussion forums is that Linux Mint is the all around best overall for hardware compatibility and adaptability moving from iOS, which was not a problem as Linux Mint is typically my go to for cross over suggestion for windows and mac users wanting to get into something stable and robust for whatever needs arise as you can get many PEN testing apps and Gaming apps/hardware working with it flawlessly out of the box.

The whole project went perfectly, 5k drivers for the display and HD camera WiFi ETC as well as a Mac like dock found while digging around, “Cairo Dock” http://glx-dock.org/ and Apple icons/theme first page of Mate desktops and Themes link in the system settings to make it all very aesthetically pleasing. The icing on the cake tho, Linux will see the SSD-Flash portion and regular hard drive separately then you are able to install and run the system on the SSD-Flash which was a generous 128GB for both 1 and 3 TB models going into 2015 for the iMac.

All around it was great re-purposing this machine as the hardware is still very relevant, it quickly got a 20GB RAM upgrade and is my daily driver for everything needed. The only thing that could possible be addressed next would be the heating issues that comes up with all of these models. Apple had CPU throttling in iOS to help with this however being the nature of Linux it takes unadulterated use of the hardware and knows what to do with it. Notably it was so funny to see super hardcore Apple users drilling holes in the lower back of the machine to let it move air more freely, rather than pop off the back RAM cover and mod that with a USB fan which was my first thought for down the road when I fire up Steam and jump on some Team Fortress 2 lol.