u/KINGxOFxIRON

Hello again my (hopefully near) future brothers and sisters.

for more context on my situation and current progress, my last two posts should be about my laptop.

for the new brethren, I have just recently replaced the SSD in my old Macbook Air because my last one blew out. It's a pre 2016 A1466 model. It seemed like it would work, but my computer didn't detect it. I'm guessing it was because it's unformatted or updated or something, and I went and searched up the symptoms to find that its possible to boot to Linux using a USB and then format it to be detectable, and then go back. What I wanted to do was just switch to Linux. I finally got a USB, and I am around a friend who has a newer Macbook Air to use for tech stuff. It looks like I was able to write Linux on the USB, but after pulling up the screen to choose what drive to boot up with, the USB wasn't recognized. Now I did use an adapter since the new Macbook doesn't have USB ports and instead has USB-C, but if that's not the issue, I am able to go into Recovery Mode and my computer does detect the USB. I need help everyone! I'm so close to fixing my computer... I can feel it!

I hope I reeled in a good amount of you nerds with that title. I've been wanting to switch to linux for a good while now, but I have a Intel-based Macbook Air and was sure the process would be difficult, and instead wanted to invest in a pc to switch to linux off the bat, then switch my laptop with the research and toolset I have with my pc... whatever that would be. however I'm in a pretty bad spot, as I am flat broke with no hope of a pc in sight and my trusty laptop's SSD just died. I've recently gotten an adapter and an m.2 NVMe SSD that was said to be compatible with my model, and just attempted to boot and format my SSD to work. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work. However, I saw on a different reddit post that someone booted linux off a usb and reformatted the SSD on linux, and then went back to mac. now I could probably do what he did and maybe get my SSD working, but if I could do all that then why don't I just install linux permanently?

tl;dr

So the question here is really, I have an unformatted m.2 NVMe SSD in my intel-based Macbook Air and can only boot to recovery mode to access disk utility. Is it possible to boot to linux, reformat the drive, then just install linux and completely wipe my computer of MacOS afterwards?

Apologies if I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I'm an idiot and not really tech savvy... I just thought maybe my future open-source brothers and sisters would be able to help me more than those evil "people" on Apple support!

P.S.: Sorry for the wall of text, I like typing