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Andrea Callegaro

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 ... 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 (?) 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.

@acallegaro

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 Only the battery (which had been replaced by a new one from iFixit in the past) had to be removed.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.