For those who want to keep macOS due to some reason: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
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
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.
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
did not test with classic Mint but LMDE has been rock solid with WiFi
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.
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 …
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.
battery is cheap and easy to replace though
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…
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
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…
i am not expecting any SSD to be worn out unless the previous owner was into heavy workloads, which isn’t the case for a lot of mac users. You can technically write over the whole SSD hundreds of thousands of time before losing some capacity. Assuming the OS runs on BTRS you’ll be fine as the file system will auto flag bad sectors.
Interesting to know, thanks.
I don’t remember if you can replace the battery though. That would also be big bet getting on of these used M Macs if that’s not the case…
As a FunFact™, you’re more likely to have the SSD controller die than the flash wear out at this point.
Even really cheap SSDs will do hundreds and hundreds of TB written these days, and on a normal consumer workload we’re talking years and years and years and years of expected lifespan.
Even the cheap SSDs in my home server have been fine: they’re pushing 5 years on this specific build, and about 200 TBW on the drives and they’re still claiming 90% life left.
At that rate, I’ll be dead well before those drives fail, lol.
How can you know how much life an SSD still has? Is it a command in the terminal on Linux? Haven’t found anything in the system information.
sudo smartctl -a /dev/yourssdYou’re looking for the Media_Wearout_Indicator which is a percentage starting at 100% and going to 0%, with 0% being no more spare sectors available and thus “failed”. A very important note here, though, is that a 0% drive isn’t going to always result in data loss.
Unless you have the shittiest SSD I’ve ever heard of or seen, it’ll almost certainly just go read-only and all your data will be there, you just won’t be able to write more data to the drive.
Also you’ll probably be interested in the Total_LBAs_Written variable, which is (usually) going to be converted to gigabytes and will tell you how much data has been written to the drive.
The battery is definitely replaceable but in latest models used to be glued on… I haven’t checked on the Apple silicon models… worse case the Apple Store can do it for you for 70/80€$ You can also remove the glue yourself, there must be an iFixit tutorial on YouTube for it
What did you do to get the keyboard and mouse to work?
nothing, they just worked
Yeah, mine was a pain in the ass. Haven’t sorted it yet. Must be a different chip set.
what distro have you tried?
A few on this machine, mostly the usual “plug-n-play” suspects: openSUSE, Ubuntu, Mint, etc. I’ve narrowed it down to needing a specific driver which will have to be installed after the install, but I don’t have an extra thumb drive for it since the one external drive I do have will have the os on it, and I just haven’t been arsed to make it work on a single drive by modifying the partition to add a second one and put the driver there. It’s just a pain in the ass.
Ouch… I had this years ago but now I am lucky as the drivers are probably embedded in the kernel
MacBook Air club represent!
Can I join this club even though I don’t have an Air?
I’ll allow it.
noice! I guess you had to setup the wifi drivers while connected on ethernet, right?
HEY LOOK ARCH
jk
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.
The best feeling ever!
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!
Some toasters can’t.
The lame ones can’t!
(Sobs in Brave Little Toaster noises)
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…
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.)
Asahi Linux
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?
Tbh those things are great little thin clients to leave near your couch, despite their age
I just put one down as I walked away from the couch a few minutes ago. :)
I bought it to carry in my backpack in Europe. Super light. Super handy. And inexpensive enough that I did not worry too much of it being lost, broken, or stolen ( which it never was ).
You should get the Pantheon desktop environment for a more Mac like experience.
