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
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.
noice! I guess you had to setup the wifi drivers while connected on ethernet, right?
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 ...
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
Yeah, mine was a pain in the ass. Haven't sorted it yet. Must be a different chip set.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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
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
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.
