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Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?

#51

Post by woleium »

convolvatron wrote: post #10
cameron_b wrote: post #3

When I was in college I remember some fellow students being overjoyed to find quality older hardware on Offerup, in order to keep up with the schoolwork we were learning, and practice on their own. I personally find that Mac hardware holds its utility far beyond its value, and that's even recognizing that most Mac products hold value in the second-hand market. I saw a Mac Pro 5.1 ( same generation as your mini ) on c…

its getting pretty hard to run OSX that far back. does anyone have any recommendations for an open operating system to put on them? freebsd used to work ok, but the page that tracks it hasn't been updated in a decade.

I have Ubuntu running on a 12 year old MacBook Air. everything works, webcam included, although it's a bit of a pain to get it going, you have to extract a key from m the hardware and compile a binary after setting it in the source.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?

#52

Post by littlecranky67 »

sys_64738 wrote: post #48
littlecranky67 wrote: post #44

By coincidence I just asked myself the same question and made it my holidays project. I installed El Capitan on my mid-2014 MBP (it does support Big Sur but it was unbearably slow & laggy and battery runtime was not good), and it seems a 2010 mac mini should be capable to run El Capitan too. Why El Capitan? Because the most current Chrome requires El Capitan (Mavericks does not work). Actually I use ungoogled-chromiu…

I run Monterey on my 2014 MBP and it runs super fast so not sure of your issue. I installed Catalina on the 2010 Mini which also works well but I've moved on from Catalina which is why this system is EOL for me.

well it's unfortunately the smallest CPU available at that time. And I also noticed it after upgrading to Big Sur, especially the battery issue.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?

#56

Post by taubek »

derwiki wrote: post #21
taubek wrote: post #4

Once I no longer need my computer I try to donate it to someone. There are some charities that will fix/upgrade them and give them to someone else. I like the reuse concept (as a general rule I buy refurbished equipment when ever I can) so if you don't need it any longer, maybe someone else would find it useful?

Do you securely wipe the hard drive before donating?

Yes, I do. I use some safe delete method (built in OS commands, wipe from BIOS, DBAN, etc.) depending on the OS and hard disk type that I was running on the computer.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your older hardware?

#57

Post by ivansavz »

convolvatron wrote: post #10
cameron_b wrote: post #3

When I was in college I remember some fellow students being overjoyed to find quality older hardware on Offerup, in order to keep up with the schoolwork we were learning, and practice on their own. I personally find that Mac hardware holds its utility far beyond its value, and that's even recognizing that most Mac products hold value in the second-hand market. I saw a Mac Pro 5.1 ( same generation as your mini ) on c…

its getting pretty hard to run OSX that far back. does anyone have any recommendations for an open operating system to put on them? freebsd used to work ok, but the page that tracks it hasn't been updated in a decade.

I was just looking into this today, and I found that https://elementary.io/ is the most popular Mac OS lookalike. It's based on Ubuntu under the hood, but I need the look and feel to be similar to what the users are familiar with.

I haven't installed/tried yet, but it looks promising. I can report updates here if you're interested.

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