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I can’t use Windows on it, because the Intel HD Graphics drivers are no longer maintained and all versions compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a regression that disables the internal display - there’s nothing you can do about it, they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

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    6 months ago

    Nomodeset won’t cause battery issues or ajy other significant issuea with your system.

    “Mode set” just moves the video mode setting into the kernel so you can access graphic card features really early at boot (and have fancy boot screens for example and have a smoother consistent boot on the optimum graphics mode for your card). Some graphics cards don’t work well with that and a flashing black screen is a symptom of that.

    “nomodeset” turns the feature off, and the boot menu uses the basic bios graphics mode settings instead. The main graphics drivers will load fully later when the X11 or Wayland call for them.

    All of the Linux systems you use should work fine with nomodeset; you’ll just have a more basic boot menu. You may notice some changes in screen resolution as the system loads but that’ll be about it.

    So you can pick whichever Linux spin you like rather than limit yourself.

    • mmus@lemmy.ml
      2·
      6 months ago

      Maybe he was using Vesa basic graphics mode in the other distros?