Reviving decade-old Macs with antiX and MX Linux (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Reviving decade-old Macs with antiX and MX Linux (2022)

sts10.github.io

199 pointsindigodaddy113 comments

Or, the MacBook and MacBook Air can run newer macOS using OpenCore Legacy:

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

The MacBook can run Catalina with full graphics support, and the MacBook Air can run anything all the way up to the latest Sonoma.

The iMac still run Lion with updated browsers / SSL certs that'll let it be used for simple tasks like watching YouTube.

One or two years ago, I have tried to run a recent macOS on a Macbook air 11" from 2011, 4GB of ram, it was just unbearable, any actions would take seconds, I wonder if it is still problematic.

Personally I think they run really well on modern OS, I've got Sonoma running well on my 2012 and 2013 MBPs.

8 GB RAM is the baseline for modern macOS. It really doesn’t like being forced to do with less, even if the 4 gb macbooks are not that old (4 gb airs were sold until 2016).

People keep nagging apple to up the baseline RAM from 8 to 12 or 16 on the new machines, but given how the 4 to 8 jump played out it would probably quickly make that vast sea of soldered 8 gb machines incapable of running newer macOS versions well.

Depends which version you tried to run, the MacBooks without metal graphics are really bad on modern OSes, but they have made a lot of progress with the patches.

For my macbook pro 13" late 2011 I've pick manjaro with gnome and with OpenCore Legacy Patcher I managed to squeeze macos 13.5 on in.

While manjaro makes the machine relatively useful for the current day - for really simple tasks that is, the 13.5 misses much especially with low amount of ram. But worse thing is that this device comes with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and some stuff just simply won't load like Maps because this GPU isn't supported by Metal API.

In the past I tried Lubuntu on eMac G4 with 800mhz PPC - it was a rather painful experience. So I replaced it with 10.4 and with help of Macintosh Garden slapped additionally os 9.2.2 for for some dualboot retro fun

I’m running Manjaro on a late 2012 MacBook Pro, it’s running flawlessly.

The only initial issue I had was that I had to configurate the broadcom WiFi driver manually. Super easy after some googling for the more technically interested person… But nothing I would expect the general person to solve without frustration.

8gb RAM, 125gb SSD. 1xBattery replacement.

It does not run IDE’s like ST32 (based on Eclipse) and OneNote via Firefox smoothly simultaneously. But everything else so far has worked flawlessly. I use it every day and have done so since the beginning of this fall.

Edit: Call me a script kid all you want, for this particular laptop it’s just more convenient for me to run Manjaro rather than Arch right of the bat. But I guess I could eventually set up a shared partition for storage and an individual partition for each OS.

Same here with my recent (free!) acquisition, a mid-2012 unibody Pro, when I installed Solus on it. However, when I booted it with MX initially, it automagically set up the wifi driver.

Lack of wifi support for any given distro I’m testing out is an instant rollback for me. I just don’t have the time or patience anymore. It has always been a problem.

Now that you mention it, I do recall issues with the WiFi on my model too. IIRC after one of bigger releases I had to manually install some driver package from AUR because existing driver was for whatever reasons removed.

Interesting, I run Webstorm for larger JS projects on Monterey on my 2012 Air. 4gb of ram w/ SSD. Little slow to start but I have fixed plenty of production bugs on the go with that thing before I retired it last year and got an X1 Carbon :)

> The iMac still run Lion ...

Pity about the lack of security updates in the intervening years.

Or just run an era-appropriate macos.

> Or, the MacBook and MacBook Air can run newer macOS using OpenCore Legacy:

This project is amazing. I just installed Ventura on an Apple Mac mini "Core i7" 2.7 (Mid-2011, “Macmini5,2”). The process went smoothly once I figured out that I needed another old Intel Mac to create the USB boot volume for an even older Intel Mac.

I'm glad you posted this info but this is where I'm stuck.

My mbp 2015 is the only Intel device I have Available and the main position died...so my only working position is windows and I'm running into issues getting into recovery. Even internet recovery wont work :/.

Yeah, that bit's frustrating if you don't have access to an Intel Mac. And I had the same experience as you with Apple's Internet Recovery — I must've tried it 20 times without success, and as far as I can tell the problem is Apple's.

LMK if I can send you a DMG with an OpenCore-enabled Yosemite installer on it. I believe I just need to know your exact model, which you can look at up at https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/. (I temporarily put my email in my HN profile.)

Emailed you, much appreciated!!

OpenCore also simplifies running Linux on the Apple EFI 1.1 environment.

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Multiboot/oc/linux.html#...

It’s such a cool project.

If one wants to put these old machines to good use, it's worth remembering (after checking that they still work), that these older machines (the iMac and the MacBook) are still user-upgradable.

The iMac should allow for 4GB of RAM (of which only 3 will be usable), the MacBook unofficially supports 8GB. Add in a cheap S-ATA SSD, and for some not too high, two digit amount of EUR or USD, these machines will be actually useful for someone.

Virtually every step in the iFixit upgrade guide for separating the screen glued onto my iMac was followed by "if you do this wrong you'll crack the screen" so I've stuck with it as a beautiful screen for connecting to other more powerful machines.

I was going to add an caveat about that, but it turns out, that for the iMac 5,1 (the model discussed in the article) RAM upgrades are easy [1] (SSD not so much, but it should still be better than some of its aluminum successors [2]).

That said, I definitely agree and advise: Before you order parts to upgrade things, check whether you feel up for the install procedure.

[1] https://de.ifixit.com/Anleitung/iMac+Intel+17-Inch+RAM+Repla...

[2] https://de.ifixit.com/Anleitung/iMac+Intel+17-Inch+Hard+Driv...

I upgraded the hdd to an ssd in a 2009 iMac. Don't think I ever noticed the "you may crack it" warning. Honestly it's not too bad. The more painful thing is actually working on the guts while also trying to hold the screen up (because it's attached to things).

That said, the RAM is user-accessible on these older iMacs from a tray at the bottom edge of the screen.

I upgraded both of my parents iMacs (about 10 years old now, but importantly with USB 3), which would otherwise have required screen removal to do the drive, by just hooking up a portable USB SSD, making it the boot drive, and taping it to the back of the machine. Huge improvement over the HDD.

These older iMacs like the one in the article didn't use glue yet! That only started with the 2012 ones iirc. So anything before that is pretty easy to fix or Upgrade!

(Especially the old aluminum ones, they just had magnets holding the front bezel in place)

I first parsed this as "decades old" and "mk linux", heh. Was rather surprised to see the new intel machines in the article and not, like, an m68k or ppc model. :)

You know you're getting old when "lightweight distro" no longer means something that boots from a 3.5" diskette and only needs single-digit megabytes of ram.

Those are actually slightly newer than my "daily driver".

If you take care to avoid the "modern" bloated crap, or notoriously intensive like new games, or now AI-related stuff, a decade-old computer is absolutely more than enough computing power for a lot of things.

Very true. My daily driver at the moment is a Latitude from like 2011 or so. It already had an SSD, I just needed to upgrade the ram to 8gb. I can browse the web, watch movies and can play older games (including csgo before they upgraded to cs2).

Some stuff sucks, YouTube is awfully resource intensive as are some other sites like Facebook, but since I mostly write it's acceptable for daily use. Thing sure does get hot though.

Clean it?

It's not that. I've taken it apart numerous times and cleaned out any dust I see. There's no clogging or anything going on.

Maybe it needs more thermal paste, but honestly whenever I've tried that in the past on older laptops it made no difference.

Not sure what else it could be. Besides, it still works fine, just hear the fan whirring up pretty often.

What CPU is it?

My suggestions: Have you checked with Throttlestop if it's being throttled for any reason? Have you tried setting your power option to performance or checking the energy options for the cooling strategy and max clockspeed allowed?

Based on what you've written, I think it's very likely that the heat pipes (if any) need to be replaced since the coolant inside has probably evaporated and escaped. As it's a Dell, replacement parts should be easy to get.

It's a core i5.

I think I set some option in the bios to limit CPU usage/speed for battery life or something hoping it would run cooler, but whatever I changed never made a difference and it's been a long time since I've looked in the bios.

I hadn't heard of throttlestop, just grabbed it to run. So CPU is specifically a Core i5-2540m

The 4 cores are all between 66c and 68c alternating, and it says max is between 76c and 78c.

'Disable turbo' is shown as checked, so is 'BD PROCHOT', SpeedStep and 'C1E'. 'High Performance' is not checked.

When you say heat pipes, would that be referring to the copper colored metal over the CPU and GPU, what I had been calling the heatsink? I had not realized they had coolant in them at all. I've never replaced that, but I'm comfortable enough changing CPUs and such so I'm not worried about doing so.

If that's what I have to replace I may look on ebay and do so, would indeed be nice to have it running less hot, and also get rid of my probably irrational fear that the heat might make the battery explode.

I had no idea either until fairly recently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe I repaired a laptop where replacing the paste didn't help, but replacing the pipes (or rather the heatsink assembly, which they're a part of) did wonders.

If you're already comfortable with taking it apart, it's trivial to replace. I think it's your best bet. You might even be able to get it directly from Dell since they also sell replacement parts.

I may look at doing so, thanks for the tip! TIL!

For such an old laptop I'm not sure if I want to keep spending money on it, $15 to upgrade the ram, $10 for a new keyboard after I broke keys from taking them off to clean them, $25 for a new battery etc.

Even though it runs very hot it does seem to work ok, and I'm hoping to just buy a brand new $100 or so machine hopefully in the first quarter of next year, but we will see. I still may end up doing so though.

I think I would have to try and buy from Dell directly, as on ebay all the heat sinks were preowned, and may be no better than the one I already have.

> heat pipes (if any) need to be replaced since the coolant inside has probably evaporated and escaped. As it's a Dell, replacement parts should be easy to get.

Was my initial guess as well, though it's hardly worth replacing unless wanting to keep it for sentimental reasons

Sounds like my Latitude e6220 - running TLP and thermald will help with the overheating. It's a great little machine, unfortunately the screen lets it down.

What is TLP? I have Windows on it at the moment as I used to play counter-strike on it, and honestly it doesn't matter to me which OS I use at the moment. I prefer Linux, but haven't put in the work to switch everything over since I need to do work on it, so no thermald for me.

Agree it's a pretty solid machine. Bought it for $10 secondhand in 2016 and it's still going strong.

Probably this [1], software for optimizing Linux power usage.

[1]: https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html

Yes, that's it.

you can use yt-dlp and mpv to watch youtube vids. Still need to find the URL yourself but you don't need their website to watch it.

Oh yeah I often do. Depends how youtube is acting in my browser at the time, which tends to depend on how many other tabs I have open.

But yeah I often just open a terminal and download the video.

Sometimes a half-solution will do, like Invidious or Piped.

[0] https://invidious.io/

[1] https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

Interesting links, thank you. I think I may have them in a text file somewhere, planning on setting them up eventually, as well as other services like various decentralized search instances and such, but I just never got around to them.

I've installed the extension to redirect videos to a piped instance and that looks like it's going to work pretty well, so thanks!

>If you take care to avoid the "modern" bloated crap, or notoriously intensive like new games, or now AI-related stuff, a decade-old computer is absolutely more than enough computing power for a lot of things.

Most likely your phone is more powerful than those old computers. Why not just hook it into an external monitor and use it?

Samsung DEX was exactly this. When I bought a Pad 6 it came with Dex bundled and it queued quite nicely as a simple Linux-ish desktop environment.

DeX still exists! I think the lack of USB monitors and dongles in the real world makes it so that very few people use it, but if you've got a higher end Samsung device andd access to a dongle, more people should definitely give it a go.

>I think the lack of USB monitors and dongles in the real world makes it so that very few people use it

You don't need USB monitors, there are plenty of cheap USB-C to DMI/DP dongles and adapters. If you already have a USB-C dock for your laptop, then the same one can be used for the DEX. The reason it's not more wildly used it's poor marketing and low consumer interest as the PC usage has been on the steady decline.

Perhaps, but those adapters often lack USB ports in my experience. USB-C docks also aren't always reliable, because many of them use the accursed DisplayLink protocol to do video.

I think the general consumer just isn't aware that this is an option. Perhaps Samsung should offer free dongles with their flagship phones to build a market, because it's a real shame people don't know about DeX.

>Perhaps Samsung should offer free dongles with their flagship phones to build a market, because it's a real shame people don't know about DeX.

Most casual average people at home don't even have PCs with monitors anymore these days. Most people who aren't on their computer all day, just have a solo laptop with no other peripherals making DEX pretty useless to the average joe

Because they come with not-really-multitasking OSes, with restricted access to file system and limited selection of software.

I have a soft spot for old hardware. And a 10-12 year old machine is able to play 1080p video smoothly (unless it was a low-end machine at the time), which makes it fine for 90+ percent of my needs. Plus, these older machines can be obtained very cheaply. With a bit of luck for free, if you offer to save friends and relatives the effort to dispose of them properly.

> Most likely your phone is more powerful than those old computers. Why not just hook it into an external monitor and use it?

Phones are content consumption devices. Maybe he wants to do something beyond watching tiktok.

App support for tools like IDEs may be lacking (browser based debugging only, but there are cloud based versions of VS Code you can use) but I could do most desktop tasks on Samsung Dex. A USB C monitor with two USB ports for mouse and keyboard would be enough for many people.

It's unfortunate that Samsung abandoned its tests running a fully fledged Ubuntu when hooked upmto a monitor.

> A USB C monitor with two USB ports for mouse and keyboard would be enough for many people.

Yeah, sadly there are entry level laptops cheaper than a phone or said monitor plus a keyboard and mouse. I said "or" not "and".

Plus you know, people cursing Apple for making Mac OS look more like iOS. I don't think the great convergence will happen any time soon.

> browser based debugging only, but there are cloud based versions of VS Code you can use

So nothing works offline.

> Yeah, sadly there are entry level laptops cheaper than a phone or said monitor plus a keyboard and mouse

Many people already have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard lying around. They'll also have a phone already. Plus, there are very cheap docks where you can just slide your phone into a laptop shell, priced similarly to the worst and most awful Chromebooks imaginable.

> So nothing works offline.

You can run a vscode server on your phone (https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server/releases). What's lacking is the VSCode GUI, so pointing a browser at http://[::1]:8080/ will work just fine.

I’ve always liked the idea of accessing a remote desktop running on your phone from a browser in any device on the network. You could use some sort of QR code to authenticate.

The Geekbench results for my phone (3 year old iPhone 12 Mini) do suggest it might actually be better than my 15" 2014 Macbook Pro, which at the time was about the fanciest you could get. Just 6 years of progress! I imagine the latest round of iPhones are even better, particularly if you go for the enormous ones.

But, meanwhile, my Macbook Pro can drive two external displays, as well as having a good size internal display of its own that will still be useful. It's got 2 standard USB ports, for connecting keyboard and mouse. Add USB hub, and you have even more options. It has fans inside, so it can run at full tilt for quite a while before hitting any thermal throttling. 16 GB RAM means it's feasible to run a VM - and, since it's an x64 system, it can be persuaded to run many x64 OSs natively. One example would be Microsoft Windows, which you may have heard of, and which has been ported to x64.

The UX without any extra devices is fine as well. As well as the nice built-in display (which is a good size, and >200 dpi), it also has a solid inbuilt keyboard and a very useable trackpad. For all that I do much prefer a proper setup on a desk with a full-size keyboard and a mouse and a nice set of displays, the UX for general use without any peripherals is quite reasonable.

Also, it has a headphone jack.

Many people expect a ‘daily driver’ to run Teams, Outlook and a browser with a couple of tabs running client side apps.

There is absolutely a lot of bloat out there, including Office apps, but that’s just the landscape these days. People get used to running a lot of stuff when they have lots of resources, and will start closing apps once they start to see some performance issues, but there doesn’t seem to be many apps outside of the Linux ecosystem that promote a lightweight ethos, and even fewer sites are built like HN.

My daily driver is over 10 years old, from 2013. Still going remarkably well.

It runs Teams and Zoom just fine. I have thousands of browser tabs. I often use the common office apps; sometimes LibreOffice and Microsoft Office are open at the same time. It is always running Firefox, Telegram, Discord, Emacs and a Linux VM. YouTube often, no problems. And many sw dev tools.

When connected, it drives dual 27 inch monitors, but usually I take it out with me. The 10 year old battery still lasts a few hours and has never been replaced. It outlasted the brand new Dell I was given for a contract last year.

As well as MacOS it runs Linux in a VM, full screen so I can four-finger swipe between different OS desktops. I use the Linux desktop mainly for Inkscape in GNOME and other scripted image manipulations. In practice for most work I prefer to SSH from MacOS to Linux, to enjoy the benefits of the iTerm2 terminal, and use Emacs as a MacOS native GUI application, operating on my Linux files.

Currently using it for compiler and OpenGL development, zero-knowledge cryptography performance optimisation, database/storage engine development, and accounting software, in C, C++, Go, Rust, WebAssembly, TypeScript and Nim and a fledgling language I'm designing.

Credit to Apple, I think my 10 years old laptop is still serving me very well!

That said, I've just ordered Apple's latest M3 Max with 128GB RAM. I expect it to feel similar, though faster, not running low on RAM and storage any more, and Homebrew not warning of an unsupported OS and compiling everything from scratch. The M3 Max will be my first daily driver upgrade in 10 years, and is quite exciting.

There are a few things I'll be able to work on more easily with the new laptop and its larger RAM. LLM architecture exploration of course, but I have my eye on EDA and silicon and photonic simulations, large scale code analysis, new data storage and indexing architectures, current gen GPU APIs, and getting back into 3D graphics. I expect the 128GB will actually be useful for new types of activities for me. I use servers now but my internet connections are slow and high latency so local will be transformative.

But old-school things like Teams, Discord, Telegram, browsers with many tabs, office applications like spreadsheets, and various software dev tools, compilers, YouTube et al, even open at the same time, seem to work pretty well on my 10 year old laptop.

I’m assuming your daily driver doesn’t have 4GB of ram though

It depends on what you bought a decade ago. I have a machine with one of these laying around:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2600+...

It will do all the things you mentioned (the CPU score is 33% that of an M2).

The entire machine cost about $1000 at the time (exclusive of case) if I remember right. It certainly wasn't $2000.

Since then I put a more modern video card in it for better compatibility (not performance).

I'd guess the original card it had (NVIDIA GTX 560) could run teams, a web browser, etc, fine, but NVIDIA's binary linux drivers don't really support that card any more (they claim to, but they don't support modern OpenGL APIs)

I use a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo 2007 iMac running Snow Leopard as my photo lab workstation. Upgraded to 5GB RAM, 512GB SSD. Runs Aperture 2, scans film, and prints photos like a dream. It can even do some light web browsing with https://github.com/wicknix/InterWebSnow, but it often struggles with the modern web.

This machine can also be upgraded to a Core 2 Extreme, but I haven't found that necessary for my workflow.

After Snow Leopard MacOS went downhill in performance, every app ran very slowly in my MacBook Pro 2007 with El Capitan, without ever using more than 30% of CPU capacity, the system just crippled them.

Agreed 100%. 10.6 is arguably the best version of Mac OS ever. It gave us 64bit GCD and was highly optimized for the hardware of the time. Native software of the time flys on the build listed above.

This guy calling my company issued MBP ancient? It’s my portal into the cloud driven clusterfuck known locally as “production” still

Personally I stopped messing with old hardware on the desktop side.

Old laptops make great servers though -- built in UPS and KVM! Fire up some containers and enable all the P states

But as a desktop there is a lot that is obnoxiously slow or flat out unusable on old gear. The modern web is really taxing on old hardware like this and its super frustrating to experience severe lag on even basic sites like youtube

This*

Old laptops make great servers for the very reasons you mentioned Built-in UPS, good enough performance and also reusing old hardware instead of a landfill.Am currently using an 8GB laptop for a server as it's become rather expensive to use a 400W (on average) 4U server 24/7.

But those aren't that old. How about the PowerPC ones? :)

The collector in me still keeps a G5 iMac in sight on a desk. Don't think I've turned it on this year.

You may want to turn it on and check how it is doing, just in case. That model is infamously known for its bad capacitors and their tendency to bulge and die.

As a side note, I find OpenBSD the best modern OS for those old PowerPC machines. The main "problem" is the lack of modern web browsers, but it is not like the CPU can handle the modern web anyway :-)

Oh yeah, if i run tenfourfox the fan screams :)

I really don't know how people used the G5 iMacs (i bought it used for like eur 100). I ordered another set of fans and both are vaccum cleaner-ish.

Not about Macs but I "revived" my 15 y.o. desktop, had original board and CPU (Q6600), SSD and powersupply stored for years. Bought 8 GB of DDR2, a fanless GT9500 and a cheap case.

My case is to have a modern PC but older types of monitors. I like to hook up CRTs just for fun. When you use sub-HD resolutions this kind of computer goes to Youtube normally.

Which reminds me of how deep we're in era of iterative design. Modern workflow is possible on a 15 years old platform, because the platform hasn't changed significantly. Imagine trying a year 2000 workflow on a 1985 PC.

Make it into a musical instrument/recording and mixing machine.

I still support those directly (airwindows.com). I also produce VST2.4s that ought to work for your Linux versions of those same Macs. Fairly often they have useful things like digital optical ins and outs. My primary development is on an old laptop running Snow Leopard for just this sort of reason. I'm pretty sure you can get versions of Reaper (or the current version) for machines this old.

If you want to get fancy put a SSD in the old machine, which will get a lot more out of it.

Only a decade of life doesn't seem to me something that should require "revival".

I'm still using my 11y/o Dell XPS which I cannot upgrade but works great.

This was my problem with the article too. It’s not that ancient.

I have 3 old Macbooks.

MacBook2,1 from 2007 (64-bit CPU with 32-bit EFI boot environment)

MacBookAir4,1 from 2011 (full 64-bit)

MacBookPro10,2 from 2012 (full 64-bit)

The article author had a link to this page at the bottom. I've used this software for years to modify the Linux ISO and then it boots perfectly fine on these old 32-bit EFI machines.

https://mattgadient.com/linux-dvd-images-and-how-to-for-32-b...

I run Fedora with the XFCE desktop on all of my machines whether they are brand new or 16 years old. It works fine on all of them, I've never bothered with a "light" distribution because the latest Fedora with XFCE always works fine for me.

Most of these stay at my sister's and parents house so I have a computer there for web, terminals, and debug stuff at their homes. I've got newer stuff for daily use but these machines are still fine for occasional use like that.

Another nice thing about the MacBook2,1 is that it's just about the easiest machine to libreboot, and once you've done that the 32-bit restriction goes away (I'm running Trisquel Lite on mine for the full "libre" experience):

https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/macbook21.html

This article is both excellent and brilliant. Lots of ideas... but one misnomer about Snow Leopard and 32-bit EFI.

"You can force Snow Leopard 10.6 to use the 64 bit kernel by holding down the “6” and “4” keys during system boot. Likewise, you can switch back to the 32 bit kernel by holding down “3” and “2” during system boot. It may be stating the obvious, but the 64 bit kernel will not work on a machine that is not 64 bit."

That is a CPU that is 64-bit, but an EFI that is 32-bit will boot Snow Leopard in 64-bit mode, and the 32-bit Snow Leopard and the 64-bit Snow Leopard will run 64-bit applications.

The 2006 MacServe was the first 32-bit EFI to boot and run 64-bit Snow Leopard, and support 32GB of ram, and I have heard that every Intel Mac that supported Snow Leopard after that could also do it, but I only tried it on Mac Pros and iMacs, and a few Macbooks. The iMacs needed a 4GB SO-Dimm on the right hand slot, and it would both recognize 6GB and run applications that were 64-bit.

Your milage may vary, but this was my source: https://blog.fosketts.net/2009/08/30/64bit-snow-leopard-kern...

You can get round that black but lit screen by connecting an external monitor. You can unplug it afterwards but it’s needed to get Linux installed on some iMacs.

Any Linux distro would run well on those, even the latest Ubuntu and Fedora.

To be fair, this would apply to all except the 1GB Ram IMac. That one would need an upgrade. After that, both the Macbook and it would run flawlessly KDE or MATE.

Tbe 8GB Ram one can just run regular Fedora or Gnome without any issues.

MX Linux is my distro of choice, currently running my 13 year old desktop I built in 2010.

I haven't used it before. Why do you like it?

Given that it's apparently worked around xfce i'm not sure how I missed it, that's by far my favorite DE.

I'm using the fluxbox flavour. I'm using it because my 13 year old desktop runs it like it's a new computer. It's rolling release, of sorts, meaning no 2/5 yearly upgrade/reinstall. I think also it doesn't use systemd, which was at some point important to me. It's really lightweight too, I run VMs on it no hassles. I used to use crunchbang before it was discontinued because I want the operating system to get out the way so I can get on with what I need to do. Unlike Mac and Windows which are, from my experience, always in your way.

It is IMO the best Xfce distro, it has a set of apps (MX-Tools) with a lot of quality of life features (snapshots, backups, services manager, and much more). Systemd is optional, off by default but works perfectly if needed. Great community and great performance, 10/10 will keep using it and installing in relatives' machines, try it!

One of the best features of MX that you can run it easily as persistent image on USB, especially if you get yourself a small relatively good NVMe SSD with enclosure (DIY USB stick)

2015 MBP i7, 16GB ram still going

The display is so good

I resurrected my wife's 13 year old Sony Vaio as an emergency laptop recently with MX Linux. I had previously tried Ubuntu and also Zorin Lite on it, both worked - but slowly and things like hibernate were broken and freezing up if left unattended.

MX is amazing on it, it runs as fast as I remember XP did when the laptop was new, hibernate works perfectly, screen dimming, extending display over multiple monitors and handling unplugging a monitor fine...all the things that Linux has been known to have issues with on random hardware.

I have now put in a bigger SSD and 8 more GB of RAM and the laptop is a great little media centre and simple gaming machine for the kids. I'm tempted to setup dual booting my Dell with MX now, it's a great desktop and project

His MacBook Air from 2012 has (roughly) the same specs as the Lenovo I bought for my son in 2021! Poor me! :)

If you bought it new from lenovo, the CPU is significantly different and improved, likely has faster RAM, usb3 and more.

Not sure I agree. While about USB3 and even USBC it might be true, but I have a MacBook Pro 2011 (2.4Ghz Core i5), that I put a 256Gb SSD in and upgraded to 8GB of RAM. It is certainly as or more powerful than the Lenovo N5030 with 8GB of RAM I picked up new this year running Windows 11.

Those older i5s age very nice. With the Open Core Legacy Patcher -- it runs Ventura very well, btw.

Which I5 you got in your macbook pro ?

Which I5 do you think the lenovo ships ?

Which DDR do you think is used in the lenovo ?

I'm not saying the apple laptops are bad, but the amount of apple hallucination in this site is bordering on insane.

Not really. I'm sure any 10 year old i5 based system would perform similarly. The point is more about how slow Intel processors still are really.

Desktop 2013 i5 - Core i5-3340 (choosing this to put your arguement at an advantage Mobile 2013 i5 - Core i5-13600T (choosing this as its mobile, with the same approximate price point).

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5175vs2071/Intel-i5-136...

While not the most informative of benchmarks, you'll find that 10 year old i5's really are quite a bit slower, especially when attempting to power more modern hardware (SSD, more powerful GPU) due to the both the slower ram, thinner busses and crappier cache.

Intels branding is -so good- that people have blurred all their i5 experiences together.

> The point is more about how slow Intel processors still are really.

The i3/i5 is not their flagship CPU, Its middle market tech, The 'middle market' gets something which is 'just enough to keep them happy'. Most of these systems run a browser and office, so as long as that works, people are happy.

When you want performance from intel you buy their higher end i9's and Xeons,

Funny how some people in the comments here are calling the OP's hardware as inferior in terms of computing power, while in reality their software is often being run on production on much more limited resources paid with quite a load of money.

I wish my 2012 17" MacBook Pro was working it had the dreaded video card failure. I wasn't aware of the recall until a few months after it ended. It sort of work for a while but it finally quit for about 2019 and hasn't been on a charger since.

I'd put Linux on it I think it would still be good. It's got an SSD stuffed with RAM, I can't recall what CPU it has. Stupidly expensive it's embarrassing for such a costly thing to fail so soon, it had been failing only a few years into owning it from new but past its warranty period.

With 1GB or more of memory, you don't need a specific distro. The most popular ones should run, albeit with not too much ram to spare for browsing with the default desktop.

You only need to install a lighter wm like icewm, windowmaker or fvwm and you are good to go.

And if those machines haven't soldered components, a wee bit more ram and replacing the spinning drives with SSDs would transform them to something functionally very modern.

Having said that I would have probably gone the openbsd/netbsd route with those machines.

That old "mac can support 64bit OSes but will only boot 32bit EFI" was one of the first rabbit hole I encountered but casually trying to install Linux. I managed to do it but with such pain. This was the first program I compiled and I didn't know C or programming at the time :

https://github.com/cassepipe/make_single_eltorito.c

I ran into this exact problem when putting linux on a late 2006 imac. I ended up using the mac specific image that ubuntu had available at the time which (based on later research) removed efi and relied on the machine's bios emulation. I tried windows 8, and then linux mint first but both didn't output sound. (I think mint defaulted to optical out with no way to change it)

Booted up into a 64 bit OS just fine after that.

I replaced the hd on a 2011 imac with SSD and it's amazing how much faster it is. Basically can be used for another 5 years.

I have a decade old Mac (2013 MBP with discrete GPU) and it runs Windows 10 perfectly fine. I even do some light gaming on it.

granted, does anyone remember MkLinux w/ the Mach microkernel?

do you know if there are up()downgradeable versions on the iPad operating system as well? Please some one..

I asked this question on tinkerdifferent and got some good leads. Unfortunately the options are sparse and somewhat more challenging to do.

https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/reviving-old-ipads-gen-2...

Old x86 Macs with non-intel GPUs tend to be a dice roll. I only pick up old models with intel integrated, as none of them are built to be serviced, and you need specific replacements for the ones that are.

They're neat machines, but even old ones hold a premium over contemporaries.

I'd also avoid any older laptop with a dedicated GPU. Particularly Apple, but I'd say it applies to every other manufacturer too considering how little thought they generally put into sufficient cooling. I've seen way too many laptops with defective dGPUs.

I want to use antiX but the "proudly anti-fascist" political message on the website worries me - we recently had news where an open source contributor had their library randomly delete files on a computer if the user was from Russia and I am not sure if the antiX developer will ever decide my country (Turkey) is evil and I deserve to get rm -rf'ed.

Surely that could happen with any distro?

I think the odds of it happening decrease as the distro gets more mainstream. At the very least you'd be more likely to be warned about it when it makes headlines.

Yes - like Asahi Linux, the developers of antiX seem pretty volatile and untrustworthy. Best to stay away.

Fedora 39 runs great on my decade old Thinkpad X1 Carbon. Proudly running systemd, too!

Debian with a basic wm, like Sway or i3, wouldn’t be a good option in those machines?

do you know if there are upgradeable versions on the iPad operating system as well?

No.

Only to newer iOS/iPadOS releases. Once it's no longer supported, it's a picture frame.

I have a lovely iPad Retina which has a tiny crack on one corner, so it's unsellable. Still has a few days of battery life on 1 charge, runs iOS 9 fine, but that means an unusable: browser, email client, FB/Twitter clients, chat client, and almost everything else.

It talks to Hotmail, and none of my 6 email accounts, including plain IMAP. It can play movies and show pictures, and read ebooks, and basically nothing else.

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