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I can’t use Windows on it, because the Intel HD Graphics drivers are no longer maintained and all versions compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a regression that disables the internal display - there’s nothing you can do about it, they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

  • Cataphract@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.