I really wish I could install Linux on my old iPad :(
I played around with old iPads for a bit and then gave up. successful vendor lock for sure. I just wanted a home assistant front end without having to sign in to apple or use safari
MacBook Air club represent!
noice! I guess you had to setup the wifi drivers while connected on ethernet, right?
HEY LOOK ARCH
jk
Can I join this club even though I don’t have an Air?
I’ll allow it.
For those who want to keep macOS due to some reason: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
I’ve been running Mint and Debian on old hardware too. A Macbook Air 2011 and one from 2015, and a Mac Mini 2014. Mint works great on them AS LONG AS you have at least 4 GB of RAM, especially since it can install the broadcomm wifi driver. Lots of screenshots and images from them here: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/media
old hardware […] at least 4 GB of RAM,
Not that old then…
The oldest I have is from 2009. It’s quite old. It came with 4 GB of RAM. That’s how I was buying computers back then, with enough ram. We have to go back to 2006 to find me buying a computer with 2 GB of RAM. I got my lesson in 1995, shortly after having bought my first PC, a 486DX/40 with 4 MB of RAM. 6 months later Windows95 came out, and I couldn’t run it, it needed a minimum of 8 MB. It was swapping like hell. So I got my lesson early on. Now, I buy new laptops or computers with minimum of 32 GB of RAM.
It is more important what it can be upgraded to. RAM will be cheaper tomorrow ( historically ).
The problem is the non-upgradable trend in laptops. Ironically I have MacBooks from 2012 with 16 GB in them but much never ones that are stuck at 8.
i’ve only owned one macbook in my life and it too came from the e-waste bin and it worked well for about 5 years.
that’s also where i got a lot of hardware that i still use to this day.
I read this on my 2013 MacBook Air 2013 running EndeavourOS. It runs amazingly well including video meetings.
I have a mid 2014 Macbook Pro still running Catalina, I wanted to change it into arch, but it saw very use and mainly my wife use it to watch movies so it doesn’t really seems worth the effort.
My mid 2013 MacBook air sees more use than any of my other devices.
I bought it for £100 a few years back and haven’t looked back.
Out of interest, what kind of battery life do you get out of it?
Depends - average would probably be about 2-3 hours? Not great but not awful for my use.
I could replace the battery and improve this - ifixit sell the kits - but currently I have no need.
Ahh right, I’m getting about 4ish hours on my quite healthy battery on Mint, which felt short. I just fiddled about with TLP and dropped the discharge rate by half-ish. Otherwise it’s a great little low-cost device!
Running a bun two on my 2015 air I struggle to get 2 hours out of it. I was able to get TLP to bring it close to 4, But it was at the cost of being borderline unusable.
What, how???
Intel MacBooks have pretty great Linux support.
I tried it but I got tired of overheating and constant fan spinning, I tried to go the vanilla route then with mbfan (or whatever it’s called) and I was never able to reproduce a level of quietness comparable to MacOS so I went back.
a simple install of the good old LMDE, everything worked FLAWLESSLY out of the box. It runs even smoother than vanilla Debian
Did you have to do any special configuration, or was it a seamless installation just like a non-mac laptop?
it was exactly flashing a windows laptop, no difference whatsoever :)
Oh I didn’t realize it was like that. I’ll have to re-visit my Mom’s Macbook
I use an upgraded 2012 MacBook Pro with Fedora and it’s very easy to install.
You still have a few caveats if you wanna use some specific software like Ventoy or Clonezilla. Otherwise it’s really easy.
As another user pointed out, the ones with Intel chips work well ie older models (idk the details as I don’t use Apple products)
I’ve been going with Spiral Linux lately when I need a VM for something (works really well in a VM), but I might have to give LMDE a try!
it you are looking for an OS that just runs, doesn’t receive tons of updates and stay stable as a rock… LMDE will make you fall in love
It’s an older Intel macbook, those are just like most Windows laptops.
If it was one of the newer macbook M’s, it would’ve been quite difficult at least.
I remember when Apple first switched to using Intel processors, people talked about being able to install Linux and other operating systems easily. I guess Apple didn’t like that.
I’ve got Ubuntu on my 2015 MacBook that worked out of the box except dedicated/integrated graphics switcher and the webcam. I also installed Windows which Apple puts out official drivers for. It’s just a computer, you can plug in a USB drive and install other operating systems just the same as any other laptop.
Im running my 2015 mbp on the newest macOS and it’s still quite okay.
My wife’s 2019 16" MPB is running pretty great. Probably got another 5 years of life left in it. She uses it to watch YouTube and play Sims 4.
My 2016 Acer Aspire V3-372T is hanging in there running Debian. 60 FPS YouTube videos are getting to be too much for it anymore. I may have to put the old girl to rest one of these days.
But hey, it does play Minetest pretty flawlessly.
I envy you, because my 2019 MBPro has fans always spinning and it seems slow and bugged, especially with the latest macOS.
Maybe I should just try formatting, but I don’t know if it’s worth the hassle.
We have a 2010 laptop that was useless with Windows. Runs NixOS now. Wife uses it for youtube, zoom calls, email etc. It is super responsive.
I gave my brother my Sandy Bridge laptop that got me through college. New battery and charger and it’s all set. The 1366x768 resolution doesn’t render pages very nicely anymore, though.
with apple devices, they do have long update periode. But when its over, the device is basically trash.
It’s not in the regular update cycle anymore but there is an Open Source tool to patch it.
Running even Ventura on a 2021 mac air is… MEGA slow
I think you got downvoted because you put 2021 instead of 2012. Made the comment sound hyperbolic instead of factual.
thanks, yes I did swap the numbers, this machine is from 2012
It still runs decently, I often forget it’s a 10 year old machine. I boot Ubuntu on it for work though, and boot Windows on it for the occasional game. It’s a useful machine.
Picked up some ‘busted’ laptops from a mate’s work clearout (they were decommissioning a building. I also got nine pine64’s and two r202s, mate got a full rack cabinet lol)
One new nvme and one disk repair later and i have a pair of vaios
Nice
I just replaced the battery in my wife’s 2013 mbp. macos runs like absolute shit on it, so i’m excited to flash linux. I like fedora but thinking i’ll start with LDME
Fedora might run well but LMDE will 100%
Debian will run on anything
I recently flashed Mint on a MacBook Air 2012, but WiFi is really unstable and slow. Probably a driver issue. I had worse luck with Debian and Fedora.
Had the same issue on MacBook pro 2012. Solution for me was to use broadcom-wl-dkms in case that might help you as well
did not test with classic Mint but LMDE has been rock solid with WiFi
If you are using an external screen see if wifi improves with it disconnected. This took me far too long to figure out…
That awful magsafe adapter design with no strain relief grinds my gears.
I still don’t know how people manage to fray those things. I used my 2013 for 10 yrs and the cable is still like new. They’re built pretty well. However, I do appreciate that the new ones are just usbc cables that plug into the brick so you can swap the cable if it does start to wear. Or so you can use MagSafe cables on non-apple power supplies.
Plus you can plug the mac into itself for free charging.
I’m currently daily driving a 2011 MacBook Pro running Arch, and it does surprisingly well. I mean, the screen is a weird resolution, the battery life sucks, and it gets very hot, but other than that …
battery is cheap and easy to replace though
Mine is 2009 15 inch model. I love it and I have been using it for more than a year. However, sometimes it is quite annoying to use, battery barely holds a charge, it sometimes completely freezes for around 10 seconds (with a lot of ata errors, I am assuming that the SATA cable is the culprit), fan are rattling and Nouveau sometimes breaks itself. The problem is that replacing all these parts would get really expensive, at least if I bought most of them from iFixit.
I have Batocera (Linux-based emulator platform) on a 2011 Mac Mini.
The only caveat is its weak integrated graphics chip that struggles to emulate fifth generation (PSX, N64, etc) and newer consoles, but since I pretty much only play 16 bit and older it’s been a solid machine.
Is there anything that doesn’t run linux lol?
How many hoops (if any) did you have to jump through to install?
Someone got Linux to run on an Intel 4004. It does take over a week to boot though. As long as you can connect a sufficient amount of memory to a CPU, it can boot Linux. If the CPU doesn’t support Linux, it can emulate a CPU that does.
Oh pretty cool!
none my dude, it installs just like it would install on a windows machine. the CPU is just a basic intel i7. It would be a different story if this was one of the newest M1x macs…
Asahi Linux
How’s Asahi Linux going nowadays tho? I know it’s probably not perfect but is it usable day to day?
It’s usable-ish, but still kinda crashy and prone to occasionally imploding.
I wouldn’t really use it as my sole daily driver, but for certain people doing certain things, it’s probably fine.
(It needs another year, honestly.)
But those on the other hand work fine, probably for 4 more years if I assume correctly
4 MORE YEARS! 4 MORE YEARS!
I just realised this doesn’t sound as impartial as it used to because it’s kamala running, not joe. Oops.
Guess it could mean the dems?
Some toasters can’t.
The lame ones can’t!
(Sobs in Brave Little Toaster noises)
