I read this on my 2013 MacBook Air 2013 running EndeavourOS. It runs amazingly well including video meetings.
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.
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.
Not sure if it's e-waste. The CPU should be decent enough for movies and office tasks.
if you wanted to run macOS on this then yes, it would definitely be ewaste
You have a lot of incredible Macs waiting to be grabbed for cheap after Apple discontinued support.
Before converting my girlfriend’s MacBook Pro to Linux, I never thought it would be possible. I don’t know why but I thought they were some special inaccessible computers.
It’s just a shame the latest ones aren’t upgradeable. Apparently the last easily upgradeable one was the 2012 MacBook and the 2019 MacPro..not sure though..
I don’t know why but I thought they were some special inaccessible computers.
It's their marketing. Marketing, marketing, bullshit and marketing. Macs get viruses, Macs have vulnerabilities, Macs crash. Doesn't matter how much their indoctrinated fans might claim otherwise, Macs are just weird PCs. In that context, their refusal to allow their owners to control them is all the more jarring and makes owning the older models like you mentioned all the more sensible.
even if they cannot be upgraded they are incredibly well built (excluding those with butterfly keyboards, steer away from those) and will likely outlive any PC you might have from the same year
Yeah but since they aren’t upgradeable anymore, you’re often kind of limited by the 8gb of RAM they often come with.
It’s also difficult to know how much life an SSD still has in it even if one day I could be tempted by a second hand M Mac and Fedora Asahi..
You can put an NVME ssd into a 2013-2017 MacBook Air or ‘13-‘15 Pro with a $15 adapter
RAM can’t be upgraded on any Mac laptop post 2012
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
Im running my 2015 mbp on the newest macOS and it’s still quite okay.
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.
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.
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'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
Is there anything that doesn't run linux lol?
How many hoops (if any) did you have to jump through to install?
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...
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.
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
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.
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...
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
The best feeling ever!
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.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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