MacBook Air club represent!
Can I join this club even though I don’t have an Air?
I’ll allow it.
HEY LOOK ARCH
jk
noice! I guess you had to setup the wifi drivers while connected on ethernet, right?
For those who want to keep macOS due to some reason: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy
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.
You can put an NVME ssd into a 2013-2017 MacBook Air or ‘13-‘15 Pro with a $15 adapter
RAM can’t be upgraded on any Mac laptop post 2012
even if they cannot be upgraded they are incredibly well built (excluding those with butterfly keyboards, steer away from those) and will likely outlive any PC you might have from the same year
Yeah but since they aren’t upgradeable anymore, you’re often kind of limited by the 8gb of RAM they often come with.
It’s also difficult to know how much life an SSD still has in it even if one day I could be tempted by a second hand M Mac and Fedora Asahi…
i am not expecting any SSD to be worn out unless the previous owner was into heavy workloads, which isn’t the case for a lot of mac users. You can technically write over the whole SSD hundreds of thousands of time before losing some capacity. Assuming the OS runs on BTRS you’ll be fine as the file system will auto flag bad sectors.
Interesting to know, thanks.
I don’t remember if you can replace the battery though. That would also be big bet getting on of these used M Macs if that’s not the case…
The battery is definitely replaceable but in latest models used to be glued on… I haven’t checked on the Apple silicon models… worse case the Apple Store can do it for you for 70/80€$ You can also remove the glue yourself, there must be an iFixit tutorial on YouTube for it
Well then I guess Apple Silicon Macs might be on my list when I’ll need something to replace my Surface Go 1 if one day it dies or if Fedora becomes more resource hungry in the future.
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.
Your SSD will likely live longer than most of the other hardware. 8gb is surely low but quite enough for running Asahi in daily tasks.
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 ).
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’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.
Do you have any insight into getting Linux to play nice with the different components of fusion drives? I have an old iMac and Mac mini both with Fusion Drive and after installing fedora or Ubuntu the SSD is seen and mounts fine but while the HDD is seen it doesn’t mount at startup despite setting it to mount at startup. I’d like to use these machines for some archiving and media hosting but that’s difficult if I can’t reliably access the much higher capacity drives.
Is there anything that doesn’t run linux lol?
How many hoops (if any) did you have to jump through to install?
Some toasters can’t.
The lame ones can’t!
(Sobs in Brave Little Toaster noises)
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…
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
Oh nice.
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?
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
You should get the Pantheon desktop environment for a more Mac like experience.
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
Yeah I won’t be buying an iPad ever again haha
Same…
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.
Nice
Nice
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 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…
did not test with classic Mint but LMDE has been rock solid with WiFi
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
Update 2 months later: this was it. I just didn’t know how to install it on Mint. Turns out there’s a Driver Manager that you can use. Thanks!
What, how???
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.
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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.
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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.
a simple install of the good old LMDE, everything worked FLAWLESSLY out of the box. It runs even smoother than vanilla Debian
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
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
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 know she doesn’t have the “M” chip, so I’d guess it’s an Intel
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.
