e-waste go brrrrrrr

I read this on my 2013 MacBook Air 2013 running EndeavourOS. It runs amazingly well including video meetings.
- Out of interest, what kind of battery life do you get out of it?
- I have a mid 2014 Macbook Pro still running Catalina, I wanted to change it into arch, but it saw very use and mainly my wife use it to watch movies so it doesn't really seems worth the effort.
- I have 2016 MB Pro with EndeavourOS as well. I can't say I don't like it, but I tend to have quite poor luck with my installs. Each time I get to the customization stage, sth breaks a little. Probably should go pure Arch.
  Nevertheless, on MacBooks up to 2014 it should be much easier and require less effort.

MacBook Air club represent!
- HEY LOOK ARCH
  jk
- 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?

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.

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
- Nice

Im running my 2015 mbp on the newest macOS and it’s still quite okay.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  I envy you, because my 2019 MBPro has fans always spinning and it seems slow and bugged, especially with the latest macOS.
  Maybe I should just try formatting, but I don't know if it's worth the hassle.

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...
  
  Asahi Linux
  https://asahilinux.org/
  
  How's Asahi Linux going nowadays tho? I know it's probably not perfect but is it usable day to day?
  
  But those on the other hand work fine, probably for 4 more years if I assume correctly
  
  Oh nice.
- 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!

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.

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

The best feeling ever!

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…

Nice
- Nice

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.

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 ...
- battery is cheap and easy to replace though
- 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.

What, how???
- 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?
  
  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!
- 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.
- 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.

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.

For those who want to keep macOS due to some reason: https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

You should get the Pantheon desktop environment for a more Mac like experience.

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 ).