Ask HN: Recommendations to revive an old MacBook (2009)
I have an older macbook and want to put it to some good use and throw in new OS or something else. Any recommendations for an OS or maybe setting it up as a server of some kind?
The setup seems to work best if you treat it as a dumb terminal. Any compute heavy tasks will basically not work so you should network into a desktop or server to get things done.
On LAN you can use X window forwarding over SSH without problems. This works for most applications.
Over WAN you can set a raspberry pi with wake on lan and use that as a jump box. If you port forward your router to the pi, you'll be able to hit the pi off network. Then tunnel your ssh connection through the pi to the main workstation. Lots of options exist for working remotely, emacs tramp + sshfs is my go to.
Not sure if you have the 2009 Core 2 Duo macbook but getting most linux distros installed is quite a pain. It has a complicated firmware setup. No modern linux distro that I've tried supports it out of the box so you have to manually perform some of the install setup by using grub-efi-ia32 and blessing the boot partition. Debian or Lubuntu work well if you get over the install hurdle. OpenBSD is the only OS that works out of the box on this model.
For hardware getting a SSD and new battery are good ways to improve performance. The DVD drive can usually be swapped out for more storage or something if you want.