I read this on my 2013 MacBook Air 2013 running EndeavourOS. It runs amazingly well including video meetings.
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.
Out of interest, what kind of battery life do you get out of it?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Tell that to corporate
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.
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, bullremoved 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…
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
sudo smartctl -a /dev/yourssdYou’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 removedtiest 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.
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.
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.
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 gave my brother my Sandy Bridge laptop that got me through college. New battery and charger and it’s all set. The 1366x768 resolution doesn’t render pages very nicely anymore, though.
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.
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.
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.
Running even Ventura on a
20212012 mac air is… MEGA slowI think you got downvoted because you put 2021 instead of 2012. Made the comment sound hyperbolic instead of factual.
thanks, yes I did swap the numbers, this machine is from 2012
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
How’s Asahi Linux going nowadays tho? I know it’s probably not perfect but is it usable day to day?
It’s usable-ish, but still kinda crashy and prone to occasionally imploding.
I wouldn’t really use it as my sole daily driver, but for certain people doing certain things, it’s probably fine.
(It needs another year, honestly.)
Oh nice.
But those on the other hand work fine, probably for 4 more years if I assume correctly
4 MORE YEARS! 4 MORE YEARS!
I just realised this doesn’t sound as impartial as it used to because it’s kamala running, not joe. Oops.
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!
(Sobs in Brave Little Toaster noises)
I just replaced the battery in my wife’s 2013 mbp. macos runs like absolute removed 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
If you are using an external screen see if wifi improves with it disconnected. This took me far too long to figure out…
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
The best feeling ever!
I really wish I could install Linux on my old iPad :(
Same…
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
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.
what distro have you tried?
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.
Ouch… I had this years ago but now I am lucky as the drivers are probably embedded in the kernel
