Nice
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.
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
MacBook Air club represent!
noice! I guess you had to setup the wifi drivers while connected on ethernet, right?
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.
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?
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…
Oh nice.
Some toasters can’t.
The lame ones can’t!
(Sobs in Brave Little Toaster noises)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I assumed he picked it up from e-waste
Conputer users should have technical knowledge to do stuff like that.
It’s not the 80s anymore. Normies are using computers now.
Which is pretty unfortunate tbh.
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.
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.
Tell that to corporate
The best feeling ever!
You should get the Pantheon desktop environment for a more Mac like experience.
That awful magsafe adapter design with no strain relief grinds my gears.
I still don’t know how people manage to fray those things. I used my 2013 for 10 yrs and the cable is still like new. They’re built pretty well. However, I do appreciate that the new ones are just usbc cables that plug into the brick so you can swap the cable if it does start to wear. Or so you can use MagSafe cables on non-apple power supplies.
Plus you can plug the mac into itself for free charging.
What, how???
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.
Intel MacBooks have pretty great Linux support.
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.
a simple install of the good old LMDE, everything worked FLAWLESSLY out of the box. It runs even smoother than vanilla Debian
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’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