I’m sitting here in 2026 runnin Fedora 43 on a laptop from 2016, and honestly? It’s smoother than it has any right to be. My entire workflow lives in Brave and Obsidian, and this “old” i5 handles it like a champ. There is something deeply satisfying about taking a “boring” enterprise machine, slapping GNOME on it, and watching it run circles around modern hardware,It’s actually fuckin depressing that a 10-year-old laptop has better utility than 99% of the “pro” hardware being sold today.have a native Ethernet port and a full SD slot. Imagine that shit No $60 Amazon adapters dangling off the side like life support just to get a stable connection 🙄that’s what I call good hardware built to last.#r/Linuxmasterrace
My 2013 Dell XPS laptop is still running beautifully with Fedora 43 too! Honestly, it’s amazing how much life a piece of old hardware can have with Linux running on it.
People talk a lot about software enshittification, but hardware enshittification is also a thing!
hel yea my thinkpad t480 is a little younger than that but it’s top tier, had to reimage a bunch of windows laptops today and got reminded just how slooooooooooooow corporate hardware can be i can’t believe people work with that and just accept it as the way that computers are
my common suggestion for people looking to switch is throw linux on your last laptop if its in working condition and see how well it runs vs your newer one with windows.
I just stuck a new battery in my laptop for its 9th birthday. Still going strong with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Hello from late 2013 MacBook Pro with NixOS
"I’ve been eyeing NixOS, but I’ll admit I’m struggling. The way the package manager works is a bit of a headache. How has your experience been with it so far?"
Moving to NixOS was quite a challenge for me. It felt like a Iot of different concepts that it took a while to understand.
I’m glad I pushed through because I take like it now. Now that I have my config everything is easy and straightforward.
Hell yeah! I’m typing this on a 2013 i7 Macbook air running LMDE 13 and it runs like a dream.
I’ve got one of those. So nice to this day. That touchpad 🥰
Wait you can run Linux on a macbook? 🤔
Yes on the intel MacBooks :) I put cachyOS on mine and even though it used to be an overheating laptop the fans don’t even start. Processor stays at around 40-50C.
Even the apple silicon ones can run linux. The only things that don’t work are thunderbolt (but you can still get USB4 from the same port) and fingerprint reader.
https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/I’d even go so far as to say Mac OS is more “polite” about dual booting than Windows is. It doesn’t overwrite your bootloader every update, and uses the more sane UTC for the realtime clock.
Running Debian on a 2014 ThinkPad T440p here — swapped in an i7-4710MQ and 16GB RAM for under $30 total on eBay. Compiles code, runs containers, handles everything I throw at it.
The real trick with these old ThinkPads is that parts are dirt cheap and endlessly swappable. Battery dying? $15 replacement. Screen too dim? Swap in an IPS panel for $25. Try doing that with anything made after 2020.
The environmental angle is underrated too — keeping hardware out of landfills while getting a perfectly capable machine is a win-win.
I got a stack of Lenovo tinys in my cupboard 🤣. I’ve put a few to good use.
We need to keep old hardware alive and avoid e-waste when possible. What is your computer?
My wife’s upgraded 2012 MacBook Pro is no cknamed the beast as it’s so snappy running Fedora Workstation.
I installed Linux on a ThinkPad T480 and it’s now my gaming PC.
(Granted, I’m a patient gamer.)
