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I can’t use Windows on it, because the Intel HD Graphics drivers are no longer maintained and all versions compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a regression that disables the internal display - there’s nothing you can do about it, they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
I’m just impressed that you tried that many operating systems before giving up
Sounds like my distro hopping, but I don’t do it all in one sitting.
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.
also causes a black screen unless you use nomodeset, which is terrible for battery life and performance
Why is nomodeset bad for battery and performance? My understanding is that you just can’t do a fancy boot screen. X will still load whatever drivers it needs.
Oh, is that true? I was told nomodeset was equivalent to using Windows’ basic display adapter, as in, no hardware acceleration for video decoding, the CPU being responsible for rasterization and composition, and so on. If that’s not true, I might go to Debian. As you can see, I’m a noob, so please do explain - I would be happier with Debian.
How random. My 2014 MBA with Intel HD Graphics 5000 runs Linux beautifully. What a difference a year makes.
This isn’t a 64 bit versus 32 EFI issue is it?
I ran into that when I was installing Linux on an iMac a while back
Could be, though I have zero idea on how to check. All I know is that I can boot the installers (mostly on safe graphics mode), and I can install the operating systems, but they will always turn to a black screen after the initial splash animation unless I boot up grub and edit the parameters to include “nomodeset”.
For the battery issue there appears to be a good source & various answers at this stackexchange thread.
If this is the 64 bit system on a 32 bit EFI issue, then the “mac” image of Debian will work fine. It was specifically made for those machines.
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
(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 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/
My iMac on debian does the same, black screen on boot
Are you using the mac iso?
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 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.
