A colleague gave me an old Macbook Pro 9.2, which was too slow even to open Safari or read emails...
After upgrading the ram from 4 to 16gb, changing the old HDD for a new SSD, installing #Fedora... I made a Zoom call while I had 20 tabs open on Firefox, with Nextcloud, Thunderbird, Telegram and Emacs open in the background.
But the thing that amazed me was the strange sense of #empowerment (?) I felt during the process.
@acallegaro Intel or mac processor? I put xubuntu on mine and its still kinda slow. Maybe fedora is snappier?
@redscare Intel i5-3210M. I haven't tried any debian distro on this machine so... no idea. But Fedora is great, everything worked right away (even the webcam) apart from the wifi, but it literally took 5 minutes to install the drivers...
@acallegaro Thanks for the reply. You havent noticed any overheating? I've been experiencing pretty high temps and been force running the fan.
@redscare nope, no overheating so far
@acallegaro Nice, I'll have to give it a whirl then. Thanks!
@acallegaro There's something very satisfying about refurbing a 10 year old computer to be 100% useful. Reduce generating new ewaste is a big plus for me. My daily personal notebook is over 10 years old.
Nice
I have Ubuntu on a MBA 2013.
It's not as fine as yours, but it is good enough for day to day stuff.
Wondering if I can upgrade the ram
edit: that's a no!
@acallegaro this is rad! And, that SSD was probably the biggest factor. Though by a slim margin, of course.
What a great story about the fix-it culture.
@acallegaro Did the same thing last year with my ~15 years old Lenovo Thinkpad x200. I installed LXLE (an Ubuntu variant) on it. Really runs like a charm, I'm using it for eceryday stuff and C++ programming. New tech is so overrated
@acallegaro Same here, Macbook early2015.
i thought that I would encounter some problems with hibernating, but everything works fine. :)
@acallegaro Ha, I have the same model here too. Also upgraded RAM and switched to SSD. Runs like clockwork with Linux Mint. Only the battery (which had been replaced by a new one from iFixit in the past) had to be removed. It had inflated and pushed out the bottom.
@acallegaro But USB-C would be nice in the meantime. There would already be power adapters at the dining table and desk.