I have an used, beat up MacBook Air 2015 - and I can’t afford a new laptop for a long while. My situation is a bit messy and sad at the moment.

I can’t use MacOS on it, because the battery was replaced by a third party and MacOS freaks out about it and locks the CPU to 400 MHz.

I can’t use Windows on it, because the Intel HD Graphics drivers are no longer maintained and all versions compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a regression that disables the internal display - there’s nothing you can do about it, they only run on external monitors.

And there’s an unknown bug on the Linux open source MESA drivers that, on the HD Graphics 6000, also causes a black screen unless you use nomodeset, which is terrible for battery life and performance. I tried the latest Ubuntu, Ubuntu LTS, Linux Mint, Fedora, Bazzite, Arch, Endeavour and Opensuse Tumbleweed - every single distro was affected.

Except Pop!_OS. Maybe someone with more Linux knowledge could isolate what they’re doing different than everybody else, but man am I’m glad I decided to test this last .iso as a last ditch effort.

Also, thank fuck for open source operating systems, otherwise this device would literally be shiny electronic waste thanks to Apple’s proprietary battery bullshit.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    also causes a black screen unless you use nomodeset, which is terrible for battery life and performance

    Why is nomodeset bad for battery and performance? My understanding is that you just can’t do a fancy boot screen. X will still load whatever drivers it needs.

    • kadu@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      Oh, is that true? I was told nomodeset was equivalent to using Windows’ basic display adapter, as in, no hardware acceleration for video decoding, the CPU being responsible for rasterization and composition, and so on. If that’s not true, I might go to Debian. As you can see, I’m a noob, so please do explain - I would be happier with Debian.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        I believe you should be fine - I’ve set it before without issue. I didn’t think it had any bearing on whether you can load drivers later (with X or Wayland).