tried to switch to it when I transitioned from Gnome to Plasma and gave up. it takes up to a minute to start up (!) as my library is on a network share, has spotty MPRIS support, it intermitently crashes just sitting there idle, and the radio player doesn’t display artist and song. so went back to rhythmbox and I’ll check back in a year or so.
then you got no problem, Jules.
as to wireless, that’s solved with 3rd party drivers getting enabled in Ubuntu-like distros (which Mint is) and installing the driver from the drivers control panel pane. how do you install it without internet? you tether your phone to the laptop via USB and allow it to access the wifi. on Android that’s done via the USB Tethering menu.
on fedora you enable rpmfusion and install broadcom-wl after you’ve done the full system upgrade post install and rebooted; otherwise you won’t be able to boot.
it’s possible you’ll need firmware for the webcam; 2011-2015 models don’t need it, no idea what the deal is for yours. and especially no idea for the abomination that’s the touch bar.
after install, install and enable mbpfan or macfanctld (just one of those, depending on the distro) so your laptop don’t explode.
this warrants a TON of upvotes, are y’all for real? THIS is what it looks like to the potential converts and I deal with them daily.
the single, giganticest, most glaring issue in every distro and DE is the complete absence of sane defaults as this dude demonstrates, his comedic chops and edge-case issues aside.
converts nowadays come from the hyper-polished world of Android and iOS devices, where you turn it on and it works. the idea that the average user needs complex setup and training and is faced with these cryptic sysadm-intended-for error messages delegates it to the narrow userbase it has, and it can be so much better.
I don’t have experience with post-2015 models, so don’t know what your issues with that model are. Wireless is easily solved with 3rd party drivers, don’t know the state of more exotic stuff (touch bar?). The base functionality shouldn’t be a problem. Have you tried booting it off the live USB?
Mint isn’t appropriate for relatively new hardware, although you can certainty make it work and your laptop is right on the cusp. A bigger issue is that it’s X11 as opposed to the default Wayland and not very up to date on modern laptop paradigms, like gestures, seamless transitions between states, etc., especially if you have macOS muscle memory.
I’d recommend Ubuntu as a first distro and once you have everything working, look into other options, like Fedora.
If you choose btrfs as your file system, you can install multiple OS with the same home so you can experiment away.
not to rain on your parade, but F5 is a downgrade from 7a in practically every aspect.
I’m aware of the glued shut aspect and there are solutions for that nowadays. getting a SDM870 and better SoC for under $100 with tons of RAM and storage, for me is more than a worthwhile trade off.
on the other hand, it’s perfectly understandable if you don’t want to dick around with all that and/or want to support Fairphone’s mission.
hell yeah! I just bought a Macbook Pro 15 2011, Core i7 for a whopping $10! according to the seller, “it just died”, so I got it to transplant the screen to a MBP 15 2010 i5; way cheaper than the $30-40 ask for a replacement screen.
turns out the fucker is fully functional, the keyboard is shorted somewhere and that’s causing the problem. replacement keyboards are like $10, so I’m presently installing and tweaking Fedora 41 and this old boy (fully kitted out - SSD, 8 GB, Radeon works, 90% battery health) is getting dragged into 2024 kicking and screaming.
edit: is there a lemmy community that’s into repurposing, fixing and upgrading old laptops, phones, etc.?
Connect your phone via USB and share the connection, on Android that’s the USB Tethering setting. That’ll allow you to download balena and the ISO of your choice.
I too repair my phones when they break and I haven’t had any issues replacing batteries, one camera assembly (was supposed to be an upgrade - wasn’t) and twice the screen with assembly on budget phones. in fact, before I buy them (always used) I check youtube for replacement videos for battery and screen. all replacements done with chinese parts, ultra-cheap and locally available.
I don’t know about the fair sourced part, I guess I’m too jaded to consider that an issue so I’ll concede that’s important to some people. I figure I’m doing everyone a service by repurposing a discarded 5 year old phone.
I’ve managed to listen to this doofus for a couple of minutes and then promptly added him to the ignore list (thanks Freetube!). whether he’s a scammer or just deluded, I wouldn’t trust or use anything that had his fingers in or near it.
if his general vibe of snake-oil salesman doesn’t put you off, putting his name on the thing should. hard pass.
the painless way would be to format the ntfs partition as ext4 or btrfs and mount it locally via fstab (e.g. to /home/user/data); windows is gone and you can use the space. you can search on how to the two things.
the deleting and resizing of the partition is a hit/miss scenario and there’s a number of ways you can mess up your install, most of them easily recoverable but that’s not something you want to waste your productive time on. then, when you eventually upgrade (to a larger disk, new laptop, new OS, whathaveyou) you’ll copy/move your data over and be rid of this abomination.
I’m curious, what’s your use case that you need that kind of a phone? just visited their site, says $550 for a somewhat mediocre phone. it’s repairable, but with expensive, fairphone-only sold parts. the OS on it needs removing, as stated multiple times ITT.
a 5 year old phone has comparable tech specs, costs like a 10th of that, you can open it and replace battery and parts. you also need to flash an alternative OS, so what justifies a 10-fold price hike?
edit:
I’m running several opensource alternatives for clients (rocketchat, prosody, matrix) and I’ve transitioned privately from telegram and XMPP to matrix. the pushback from users is immense, they find every possible reason and excuse to stick with the messengers they’re used to and use “the new stuff” for the bare minimum.
privately it’s easy easier, that’s the only way you can get ahold of me, so if you need/want me, that’s where I am at. for a short while tried to make it work with signal, but a) the phone number thing is a deal breaker (usernames get me only halfway there) and b) I switch and use multiple devices often and that thing is downright hostile towards people who own/use > 2 devices.
bear in mind, I’m in a dictatorial position. they have to do what I say and even with that, it’s an uphill battle. it doesn’t help that the stuff they’re now forced to use has subpar to downright dogshit UX.
the new, shiny, superawesome, superfast element x… is crap. I thought Signal was crap - this is another level. I don’t mean for me, it’s crap from the point of casual users, they are coming from the super polished world of telegram and imessage and twitter and friends and everything about this is off-putting. a lot of them need help setting this up, especially if it’s a multi-device scenario.
the immediate future looks bleak and I don’t see an important development on the horizon that would change any of this. but, that’s how telegram spread, early adopters switching to it and promoting it and dragging normies along. let’s hope for a repeat.
check out the big brains on @joyjoy@lemm.ee! works, thanks!
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anyone have expand-on-hover thingy to recommend? can’t close an item in the sidebar with minimal clicking.
they are widely available and cheap.
yeah, those are too big. was hoping to score an ITX-sized abandonware for cheap and retrofit it with a 10 TB or so drive. I had this thing many moons ago:
it could fit a drive, with some wiggling and swearing. so I figured maybe something similar exists. building it from new parts is way, way out of budget.
edit: this is how it ran for close to a year.
a good point. while I appreciate all the usual parables to explain the issue, to me it’s quite simple. namely, me and the evildoers have a fundamental disagreement on the concept of “whose shit is my shit?” the moment their actions indicate it’s theirs, I am in active resistance mode.
first off, you’re not alone out there because standard 1080p screens are often ran at 150% which is equal if not worse to your use case.
gnome is downright abhorrent about their gigantic, space wasting UI elements. moving to plasma was like gaining 30% display area. like, the insanely large title bar in terminal, with huge buttons in it. who clicks on stuff in a terminal?! and does it so often it warrants those things present as default?
macbook boards are ultra-resilient, if you get continuous fan spin you can almost always get them to a useable state. in this particular case, the machine powered on, spun the fans, turned on the screen, displayed the white loader screen for a second and immediately powered off.
never heard of such a thing, their quirks and failures are pretty well documented (logi.wiki, r/macbookrepair, etc.), so I unplugged everything from the board (battery, keyboard, touchpad, HDD, ODD, wifi, camera, display, etc.) and connected it to power and - continuous fan spin!
then started reattaching one by one until it failed again and it was the keyboard. so, ran it with an external keyboard and checked everything and it’s in excellent working condition. I used the opportunity to change the decade old paste on CPU & GPU and cleaned it from dust, insects, hair and other crap. I’m getting a new keyboard on monday ($13 new, $15 used) and assembling everything. maybe do a write-up.
added, never heard of the term, gracias.