• Panos Alevropoulos@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    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.

    • willougr@lemmy.world
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      28 minutes ago

      If you are using an external screen see if wifi improves with it disconnected. This took me far too long to figure out…

    • ADandHD@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 hours ago

      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

  • Dariusmiles2123
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    7 hours ago

    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…

    • rmuk@feddit.uk
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      2 hours ago

      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.

    • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 hours ago

      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

      • Dariusmiles2123
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        4 hours ago

        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…

        • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
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          4 hours ago

          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.

          • Dariusmiles2123
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            2 hours ago

            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…

  • RoabeArt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 hours ago

    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.

  • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    6 hours ago

    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 …

  • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
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    9 hours ago

    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

      • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
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        8 hours ago

        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.

    • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
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      8 hours ago

      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.

    • ChouxFleur@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      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.

          • propter_hog [any, any]@hexbear.net
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            3 hours ago

            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.

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
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      12 hours ago

      if you wanted to run macOS on this then yes, it would definitely be ewaste

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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        12 hours ago

        I personally don’t share the same definition of e-waste. Having to install Linux, a custom ROM or modded software to make the machine fully usable doesn’t make it complete e-waste imo. Conputer users should have technical knowledge to do stuff like that.

        • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          5 hours ago

          Most corporations are not going to do that because they often standardize around products with known solutions for management that come with service guarantees. No one wants to support a small fleet of aging hardware running an os outside the dominant platform.

        • Telorand@reddthat.com
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          12 hours ago

          That’s the point. Most users don’t know how to do that, can’t be bothered to learn, so this laptop would have been e-waste under most other circumstances.

          • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 hours ago

            I think their confusion comes from OPs title.

            Why is it “e-waste go brrrrrrr” when OP is presumably saying they’re keeping this laptop out of the machine? _ machine go brr is a dumb meme in the first place, people using it the wrong way makes it even dumberer.

          • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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            8 hours ago

            Yes but if a person uses a computer and doesn’t want to learn stuff, issues that come from it are (at least partially) their fault.

            • Telorand@reddthat.com
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              7 hours ago

              Sure, but that’s kind of a nonsequitur to the question of whether this would have ended up as e-waste.

              A: Would this end up as e-waste?
              
              B: It's the end-users' fault if it does.
              
              A: Okay, so...would this end up as e-waste?
              

              We don’t literally know, because we can’t predict the future, but we can be reasonably certain that old tech like this laptop would have become e-waste in the hands of your average user, regardless of whether they should have been expected to take the time to learn how to prevent that or not.

        • rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com
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          11 hours ago

          My parents (who are nearly 70-year-old computer users, by the way, and threw away their 2010 Apple laptop in 2015 because it essentially stopped functioning) absolutely don’t have the technical knowledge to do something like this. I think you may be vastly overestimating the average user.

        • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
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          11 hours ago

          Conputer users should have technical knowledge to do stuff like that.

          It’s not the 80s anymore. Normies are using computers now.

            • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
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              8 hours ago

              Happens. Cars used to need special skills to even get started and drive around. Now a five year old can start one and drive off if they can reach the pedals. But they won’t have any clue how it actually works.

    • 𝕾𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖞 𝕿𝖚𝖓𝖆@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      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.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        9 hours ago

        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.

    • DannyBoy
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      11 hours ago

      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.

  • gravitas_deficiency
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    11 hours ago

    Tbh those things are great little thin clients to leave near your couch, despite their age