• Taleya@aussie.zone
    19·
    3 天前

    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

  • UntitledQuitting@reddthat.com
    11·
    3 天前

    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

    • TwinTusks@bitforged.spaceEnglish
      4·
      3 天前

      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.

    • ChouxFleur@lemmy.world
      17·
      3 天前

      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.

        • ChouxFleur@lemmy.world
          3·
          3 天前

          Depends - average would probably be about 2-3 hours? Not great but not awful for my use.

          I could replace the battery and improve this - ifixit sell the kits - but currently I have no need.

          • atomp@lemmy.world
            3·
            2 天前

            Ahh right, I’m getting about 4ish hours on my quite healthy battery on Mint, which felt short. I just fiddled about with TLP and dropped the discharge rate by half-ish. Otherwise it’s a great little low-cost device!

            • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 天前

              Running Ubuntu on my 2015 air I struggle to get 2 hours out of it. I was able to get TLP to bring it close to 4, But it was at the cost of being borderline unusable.

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
    26·
    3 天前

    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…

    • maccentric@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      6·
      3 天前

      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

    • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
      22·
      3 天前

      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
      8·
      3 天前

      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@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        3 天前

        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
          4·
          3 天前

          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@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            3 天前

            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…

            • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
              1·
              2 天前

              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.

              • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                2 天前

                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.

                • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
                  1·
                  2 天前

                  sudo smartctl -a /dev/yourssd

                  You’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.

            • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
              2·
              3 天前

              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

              • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                3 天前

                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.

        • pressanykeynow@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 天前

          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.

    • Loucypher@lemmy.mlOP
      535·
      3 天前

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

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
        1628·
        3 天前

        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.

        • Telorand@reddthat.com
          631·
          3 天前

          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.comEnglish
            161·
            3 天前

            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.

            • FippleStone@aussie.zone
              1·
              1 天前

              Oh man I cannot stand it, it’s a tolerable meme format at best when used correctly, but I find it insufferable when it’s applied mindlessly like this

          • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
            36·
            3 天前

            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
              8·
              3 天前

              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
          19·
          3 天前

          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
          161·
          3 天前

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

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

        • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          3 天前

          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.

  • Panos Alevropoulos@lemmy.ml
    10·
    3 天前

    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
      7·
      3 天前

      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
      6·
      3 天前

      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

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
    33·
    4 天前

    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.

  • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    3 天前

    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.mlEnglish
        3·
        3 天前

        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.

        • LeFantome@programming.dev
          2·
          2 天前

          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.

    • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
      1·
      3 天前

      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.

    • 𝕾𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖞 𝕿𝖚𝖓𝖆@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      3 天前

      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.

      • Scrollone@feddit.it
        1·
        3 天前

        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.

        • stellargmite@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 天前

          My 2019 mbp is my work daily driver doing fairly heavy design , video, and blender work no problem. Runs well. Probably gets 6-10 hours a day of use. Video rendering a little slow but not egregiously so. It was upgraded to the max though. Its late 2019 intel. Not sure if its on latest OS but shouldn’t be too far behind.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
        4·
        3 天前

        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.

          • sfxrlz@lemmy.world
            1·
            3 天前

            Yeah I mean mine isn’t fast but it’s still usable imo. The MacBook air 2012 was already particularly bad in its lifetime, I remember doing it support for the company I was working for at the time and the air 2012 were only used for lightweight stuff but already so slow.

          • olympicyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            3 天前

            I think you got downvoted because you put 2021 instead of 2012. Made the comment sound hyperbolic instead of factual.

    • DannyBoy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      3 天前

      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.