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Okay so I found this old MacBook (I mean OLD, it even has a hot-swappable battery and an optical drive) and I have no idea if it’s even worth the effort of installing anything on it. What do you guys think I could do with it?
Edit: note that this is just from a live usb, it has 120GB storage
What cant you do with it? Find out and let us know.
Looks like you are kind of limited because of the resolution. I mean, if you are downloading pictures of big black titties, on such low resolution, you can really only see the left titty or the right titty. You need more pixels if you want to see them both, at the same time. Highly recommend you upgrade to 4k resolution.
I'd love to have something like that (with a new battery); I'd install a headless Debian and live in the TTYs. Just like a numeric typewriter.
Moc, castero, pluma/texworks, and radion.sh (look it up).
Great machine for word processing.
Add in mednafen, tweak some configs, and enjoy classic emulated games.
maybe use it for playing around and learning new stuff
Hmm, that’s a good idea, I have a homelab setup with my jellyfin server on it, but I don’t actually have a computer I can just mess around with and “ruin” the OS
If it doesn’t already, upgrade it to a cheap SSD. You can get them as cheap as $10 brand new nowadays for 128GB. You’ll increase the boot time and make the future plans much better.
perfect machine to experiment with lightweight self-hosted services like pihole, wireguard vpn, or even a simple audiobookshelf server that you can acess from your jellyfin network.
I second this. It's great to have a scrappy laptop to test stuff out on.
No risk, all of the reward.
Core 2 duo is bearable until you run a browser. Overall, it is too weak machine to use modern software. "Macness" won't make things easier either. Give it some Mac fan and wash your hands.
Oh, but now OP will be motivated to test all the lights browsers.
Back when I did that, Midori was a clear winner in terms of usability. If you want to make the browser even lighter, you’ll start bumping into some pretty significant compromises. If you don’t use modern websites, you can actually get away with something like Netsurf or even Lynx.
Should be ok to remote into a more powerful machine. That's what I do with my oldies. That way the heavy lifting is handled elsewhere.
That is quite a rare type of usage. Those who need "thin client", already have one (modern and actually thin), those who don't -- don't have and don't need, let alone some old Mac.
Nothing fancy at my end. Just Rustdesk to my i7 laptop from other rooms in the house using Debian as the client. Works pretty well even from away, so I only have to maintain one 'good' computer.
So you use a laptop to connect to a laptop and think that many people should too? :)
That's peculiar... yes.
Well it saves the hassle of having to unplug the monitors, speakers etc, and it's accessible from anywhere I go. The i7 laptop is used more as a desktop.
I'm not saying others should - the point was that using a crappy computer is practical if it's not having to do the heavy lifting.
If you have a homelab server chances are you are able to run a VM with remote access. If that's the case then you can use the MacBook as a thin client for remote access.
I don't know anything about Mac hardware, but if it's possible to put another 2gb of RAM in there and an SSD, it should be fine for web browsing.
I did something similar for a friend. I spent about $25 on hardware to put equivalent upgrades in an old laptop that had a single core celeron processor. I installed linux mint xfce. It ran firefox fine but couldn't quite play smooth video on YouTube. It was otherwise usable. A dual core should be workable.
It should be absolutely possible to put a data SSD in, that model also has an unofficial max ram capacity of 6gb
Could be useful if you like to have something to SSH into things.
For instance, I find it useful to SSH into my desktop through termux on my phone. But using a phone keyboard for that isn't very comfortable. But yours has a dedicated keyboard.
I see a very decent media player, maybe a PiHole, or you can add some USB storage and have a nice backup server.
Just because it won't run a browser it doesn't mean it should be thrown away.
I doubt it even has H265 decoding support. I don't see a viable media player there.
I wrote media player but I meant media server. It could run Jellyfin and serve media to other devices on the network.
If you completely disable transcoding maybe.
I'm sure you're right, there's not enough CPU power to transcode on that old CPU, but I'd say it's enough to stream some data. Hell, I've done it using an old Core2Duo Sony Vaio laptop...
Try installing Debian or Opensuse MicroOS without a Desktop Environment, that way you can save some memory and disk space. You can run cockpit if you want to control it through another machine. Useful if the keyboard or display isn't working.
You can use it for learning about self-hosting like setting up podman/docker or installing firewall etc. You can even run a simple pihole DNS server.
I'm running klipper for my Ender 3 with almost that exact same config on a 2008 STI IS1415. It also manages to run i3 with qutebrowser without a hiccup. Compared to the Pi 3B+ I had before, I get a keyboard and screen to control the printer without running to my desktop on the other room, and the integrated wifi is actually pretty decent, it even shows the camera feed smoothly.
Check out Bodhi Linux 7.0 HWE
Since you have already asked this question, you have no use of it. You had better sell it to someone who can make better use of it.
Run tinyLinux
Core 2 duo? I had one of those in my desktop back in the day. Waaaaaay back in the day.
It's good to keep some old computers to play around with. This looks particularly old, so you could look at trying some ultra lightweight desktop environments and browsers - don't really have any current recommendations there myself but it could be fun to see what you can do with it.