I’m going on a trip. It’s neither vacation nor work. I may drop off-line.
I don’t (didn’t?) own a laptop. I also keep my cell phone as restricted as I can. (I’m not going to let that little mind spike and spy device worm too deeply into my world.)
I have an iPad. It works but iPads aren’t really “compose a post” devices. I’ve tried Bluetooth keyboards and stuff, they work in theory but less so in practice. The truth is that iPads (I’m including all tablets in this theory, Android too) are built for consuming but not producing. There are folks out there who insist they’ve used them for everything: they’ve written novels on them, they run a server farm from the little touch screen, and they supposedly they manage a corporate budget on some spreadsheet adjacent app or whatever too. Such users are probably an outlier; or exaggerating. Also my iPad is old and the screen is cracked. It still works fine as an entertainment toy; cracked screen or not.
I was going to buy a laptop before this trip. I didn’t. I thought about it but just couldn’t burn the cash. Every time I thought about buying a laptop I thought about NOT spending the money. NOT spending money is one of my favorite activities. I chose to kick the can down the road a bit longer. I shall also daydream about all the stuff that costs the same as a laptop but is so much more fun to have.
My “solution” was to scrounge a weird alternative option and see if I can “make do”. I found a very old, very obsolete, tiny, not very powerful MacBook Air. It’s got a screen the size of a pop-tart. Ok fine it’s two pop tarts. I didn’t know they came this small! There’s not much memory, the storage is small, and the battery is possibly aged. It was probably gutless when it was new and that was many years ago. It was on its way to an e-waste facility. I grabbed it and scampered away with it.
It’s far fro perfect. I was hoping the hardware would be upgradeable. It’s not. They say the RAM is soldered in. I think swapping the battery is an issue too. Shame because it only runs an hour or so on DC. For now the AC power cable works so I’ll get by. Maybe limited RAM is also “good enough”?
Realistically, it was trash. But I needed something and I like to “build”. It would be a shame to miss this chance to try turning nothing into something. Another word for “cheapskate” is “guy who really does recycle”.
The machine was slower than molasses on its native OS. Apple hasn’t supported the OS for ages and I can see why. So I made a bootable thumbdrive with MX Linux. It booted fine. I told the interface to “go for it”. The button didn’t say “unleash whatever nerd powers of Linux are at hand” but that’s what I should say. There are clever people out there and they know what’s inside a Mac better than I. They did well! I’m impressed. The install was fast-ish and the light simple version of Linux it seems stable. I’ve done Linux/Win dual boots before but this worked better. I’ve never done a full OS nuke of an Apple product. It shockingly well. In fact, if this test run works out I might do it again. I’ll buy an obsolete but not quite so obsolete Mac on eBay or something specifically so I can “Linux it”. (I’m not the first guy to think of this idea. It’s a minor secondary market.)
The trip is a real world test. Is this little pop tart enough for blogging from hotels or whatnot? Even with Linux I have my doubts. The screen is small and the CPU is weak. I guess I’ll find out.
If I vanish for a couple weeks, it just means my experiment cratered. Or it could work fine. Wish me luck.
My favorite typing device is a pathetically slow netbook computer. It’s tiny. Batteries as old as they are still last. But it needed to be linuxed too. And now it makes for a cute video player too.
Sweet! I like that idea and have the old hardware, so … off to the races. Thanks AC and safe travels!
I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but my primary computer is a 2015 Macbook Air I inherited from my wife that’s running Linux Mint with the Cinnamon interface.
I’m writing this comment on it as we speak.
It is awesome. Runs very fast, is very stable and with open source software can do everything I’ll ever need it to do. The only two shortcomings are gaming, but I’m not much of a gamer and even that is better than it used to be, and compatibility with streaming services. There are probably ways to get the streaming stuff to work, but it’s not a big deal to me so I’ve never pursued it.
I did put a new battery in it after I got it from her and I upgraded the hard drive from 256 Gb to 1Tb. The hard drive upgrade ended up not really being necessary. I originally started out dual booting between linux and MacOS, but after about a month I realized I hadn’t used the MacOS installation that whole time, so I nuked it and went straight linux. If you do that from the jump, 256Gb is probably fine as long as you don’t store thousands of pictures or videos or big files like that.
I’d think it would work just as well on an outdated Dell or Lenovo windows laptop which you can probably get even cheaper than an old Macbook.
Hmmm. I’ve got an antique 386 based IBM Thinkpad in my attic that still works (the battery’s gone so you have to leave it plugged in, but the computer itself is fine)…I wonder if I could get Linux mint to work on that…if I can still find a 32 bit version of it that is. Interesting experiment anyway.
Why not try a Raspberry Pi? The latest ones have impressive stats for humbler uses, and can be augmented with many things useful to the versatile geezer.
Stefan v.
Have a good trip.
Best of luck! And glad to see you told Apple to “stuff it” by installing Linux!
I had been running Linux on a 12 year old netbook. Yeah, it was slow but it worked. Anyway, the netbook gave up the ghost and I couldn’t get repair parts so I opted for a refurb Dell 5420 from Micro Center. I installed a new SSD & installed Linux Mint. The thing is amazingly fast and the Linux world is growing up fast. There is very little I can do on my Wondoze machine at work that I cannot do on my Linux machine.
Linux Mint is about 93 percent Windows. It works for most people, and it works on hardware Microsoft has abandoned. No AI slop
I’ve run Mint before. It was fine. This time I tried MX Linux because someone recommended it with Macs.
AC – don’t buy any computers yet, I may have a solution for you in a couple of weeks depending on what our county auction tosses out. I have already bought and updated about a dozen of them for friends and family, will try to snag one more. Fair winds and come back intact.
I’m definitely interested. By all means shoot me an email when and if you snag a spare computer. Thanks!
Be safe out there, AC. Crazy days…
Every dollar you don’t spend is$1.25 to $1.50 you don’t have to earn.
EXACTLY!