I have an used, beat up MacBook Air 2015 - and I can’t afford a new laptop for a long while. My situation is a bit messy and sad at the moment.
I can’t use MacOS on it, because the battery was replaced by a third party and MacOS freaks out about it and locks the CPU to 400 MHz.
I can’t use Windows on it, because the Intel HD Graphics drivers are no longer maintained and all versions compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a regression that disables the internal display - there’s nothing you can do about it, they only run on external monitors.
And there’s an unknown bug on the Linux open source MESA drivers that, on the HD Graphics 6000, also causes a black screen unless you use nomodeset, which is terrible for battery life and performance. I tried the latest Ubuntu, Ubuntu LTS, Linux Mint, Fedora, Bazzite, Arch, Endeavour and Opensuse Tumbleweed - every single distro was affected.
Except Pop!_OS. Maybe someone with more Linux knowledge could isolate what they’re doing different than everybody else, but man am I’m glad I decided to test this last .iso as a last ditch effort.
Also, thank fuck for open source operating systems, otherwise this device would literally be shiny electronic waste thanks to Apple’s proprietary battery bullshit.
EDIT: guys please explain “nomodeset” to me I can’t believe I’ve spent 12 hours testing Linux distros for no good reason please send help
Not a horrible place to be stuck, though. Pop!_OS is pretty great. I run it on my media server and it’s been rock solid. I definitely wouldn’t mind running it on an old laptop.
+1 for Pop. I fully expected to distro hop but have had it on my main rig for over a year now. Surprisingly pleasant.
Pop was a great stepping stone for my apple-fanatic of a partner. Installed on media tower for the main T.V. and now they’re actually seeing the value in replacing the apple tv in the bedroom for something more customizable with protections (the ads alone on youtube are so blatantly horrible that it’s a completely different experience viewing the same video from different rooms now). When we started getting ads on our paid-subscribed services, the whole “subscriber eco-system” those devices are based on just completely became obsolete when we started cancelling one service at a time. I feel bad for the little apple device though, it’s got some impressive hardware for it’s packaging. Gonna have to see what I can do to make it useful again one day with a second life use.
Is your battery dead dead? It should work just fine with a 3rd party battery, I’ve never had any machines give me problems with 3rd party ones. It’s only when the battery is below 5% state of charge that it will throttle like that.
I don’t know about the 400Mhz part but I’ve had a similar experience with my 2012 Retina MacBook Pro. I replaced the battery multiple times with an iFixit one, and since then the computer has had all kinds of problems (dying at 40% battery, randomly switching off and other similar things). I’m on my third replacement battery, so either I’m really unlucky or there’s something fishy going on
I’m also running an Ifixit battery and have had zero problems save for the original battery being DOA out of the box. 3 in a row is really bad luck.
(dying at 40% battery, randomly switching off and other similar things). I’m on my third replacement battery, so either I’m really unlucky or there’s something fishy going on
Not unlucky, they’re just garbage 3rd party batteries, and no official 1st party batteries.
Yeah :( It sucks because I don’t think there are any alternatives, and they’re expensive too for what they are
Not dead dead, just made by a third party and at around ~83% capacity compared to new. Every system works fine, just with the lesser battery duration as expected. MacOS will freak out though and alert about the battery, which is why I assume it’s some kind of genuine part restriction
I’m just impressed that you tried that many operating systems before giving up
My 2015 air has been running Ubuntu for about 6 months, I even did the hack to swap the function and control keys.
Power’s not the best. It can only do about 2 hours even after I tune the crap out of everything and apply to every cheap power saving gimmick I could come up with.
I can’t use Windows on it, because the Intel HD Graphics drivers are no longer maintained and all versions compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a regression that disables the internal display - there’s nothing you can do about it, they only run on external monitors.
I find this very hard to believe, Intel HD is the most common piece of shit iGPU out there, generations of cheap and expensive machines come with it.
Did you try Debian? Maybe the standard version will do it, or the mac ISO “for older machines”: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/
You’re correct about Intel HD graphics being everywhere. But the bug only affects MacBooks with internal display adapters, not general laptops, which is why it’s not more widespread. You can find a lot of people facing this issue on Macs though, it affects the HD Graphics 4000 family too.
My iMac on debian does the same, black screen on boot
Are you using the mac iso?
Nomodeset won’t cause battery issues or ajy other significant issuea with your system.
“Mode set” just moves the video mode setting into the kernel so you can access graphic card features really early at boot (and have fancy boot screens for example and have a smoother consistent boot on the optimum graphics mode for your card). Some graphics cards don’t work well with that and a flashing black screen is a symptom of that.
“nomodeset” turns the feature off, and the boot menu uses the basic bios graphics mode settings instead. The main graphics drivers will load fully later when the X11 or Wayland call for them.
All of the Linux systems you use should work fine with nomodeset; you’ll just have a more basic boot menu. You may notice some changes in screen resolution as the system loads but that’ll be about it.
So you can pick whichever Linux spin you like rather than limit yourself.
Maybe he was using Vesa basic graphics mode in the other distros?
Welcome to the Linux community!
As others said, you can use any distro, enjoy!
I have a 2011 MacBook pro with Arch Linux on it as part of my make shift homelab. It’s a good feeling to revive these things.
My brain can’t comprehend this. A MacBook Pro 2011 is twelve years old. But in my brain, I still see it as a high powered fancy laptop, running Photoshop cs4 and just being a beast for multimedia projects. Ugh being old…
And this is why monocultures are bad. With OSX or Windows, you get a bug like this, you’re done. I’m the diverse Linux ecosystem you will find something, somewhere that works.
Hmm. I still have my old 2013 MBA that I’ve used with Fedora, but it’s an HD 4000 IIRC. I feel you on Apple’s locked down stance to repairs. It was ultimately what pushed me off of OS X. I needed a newer laptop in 2020, and they only sold hardware with non-upgradable RAM and SSDs. So long and thanks for all the fish… I had already replaced my desktop machine with Linux a few years earlier. I used the Mac 70% as a Unix machine anyway, so it was a pretty comfortable transition.
My Air worked great as a stand-in laptop when my System76 Lemur died last summer. Honestly I was blown away by how perfectly usable it still was for basic tasks. Parallel stuff like compiling was slow, but single threaded stuff still ran just great. Heck, I was even using it again yesterday to test OS X builds of my game on older hardware and it ran like a champ.
I don’t have a 7,1 in front of me to test with, but that sounds like a bad battery.
I’m pretty sure the pre-retina airs don’t have any kind of counterfeit battery detection, so if it’s freaking out then the battery’s not communicating right or communicating that there’s a problem.
It’s probably not dangerous, just keep everything backed up and use a journaled file system and put in a good one when you get a chance.
