I've recently been chatting about Linux with my friends and stumbled upon this awesome artwork while looking up Xenia (the alternative Linux mascot).

The artist is RiniDisc, you should check out her Mastodon and Bluesky for more cool art.

In the artwork Xenia is depicted ranting about how uncool Macbooks are and how Thinkpads are better. It made me reminisce a little because I definitely remember myself back in high-school making fun of my friends Macbook and hating everything Apple. It made sense back then - that was right around the time Macbooks had that melting hinge incident and that era of Apple is marred by various other quality issues and a pretty disappointing line up of new products. I remember detesting my mother's Macbook Air too. She spent a lot of money on it at the time and constantly had to borrow my dinky Asus to have stuff done on it because she couldn't run the software she needed to run on her Mac and was also not very familiar with MacOS in general.

But as I grew older I found my unrelenting hatred of anything Apple, well, relent. As an adult I have to buy my own things and I can choose what to get and Apple products became available to me. A few years ago I saw an old Macbook Pro for sale for $20 at my local thrift shop. I figured, hey, why not? Its only $20. It was a model from 2010 in a bit of a rough shape, but not too bad. One of the corners bent, a few screws missing but it came with a charger for $10 extra and it was booting. Only thing it was missing was its original hard drive. When I got home I installed an old 120Gb SATA SSD into it and after mucking around with shady torrent sites I got it to boot High Sierra. I never had an Apple computer of my own so this was an exciting experience even despite Apple making it as hard as they could to get their own OS reinstalled back onto it.

This happened after I moved countries so I didn't have a spare "shop" laptop I could use and abuse when I needed to get some dirty work done and since this was my only other functioning laptop I installed Linux Mint alongside Catalina (which I had ended up patching onto the thing right after playing around with High Sierra). To my surprise Linux Mint was running incredibly well on it! Everything worked out of the box, from Wi-Fi to touchpad gestures, sound, sleeping, everything. It also ran like butter, despite this Mac only having 5 gigs of RAM (I couldn't find a second 4Gb stick to pair with the one I had so I opted for the only other one that worked, more on that later). Now, I know Linux works great on older machines and whatnot but I really didn't expect a Mac to pair so nicely with it. It really made me rethink how I viewed Macs in the past. What I had now was a pretty zippy little machine with a working battery, a pretty nice keyboard, a great screen and an abundance of ports (it even has a CDROM!).

Having remembered that, and my view of the things in the past while looking at this artwork made me wonder. In lieu of the recent trend of enshittification the world has kind of been flipped upside down. Apple has recently had a big comeback with its new line of chips. Some of their new computers are heralded as a "budget-friendly option" and people really seem to like what they've been offering[1]. Meanwhile, Lenovo, HP, Dell and their ilk seem to have fully dedicated themselves to making overpriced non-user-serviceable garbage[2]. Whats more pertinent to the art piece itself however is that Thinkpads have really risen in price. Its kinda hard to get your hands on a nice one, best you can do on a budget would be something too old or one of those icky models they made with a very specific issue which is why they sell for cheap. Meanwhile older Macbooks often go overlooked and end up going for what I ended up paying for mine. I see the same model as the one I bought still appear in the thrift stores every now and then for pretty much the same price. All that to say, both the new and used device markets have changed, a lot.

There are a few caveats I'd be remiss to omit though. For example my Macbook, the 2010 Pro model is really and I mean really picky about RAM. I tried just under a dozen different sticks of RAM and only 2 have worked - a 4Gb stick from Hynix and a 1Gb stick from some company I can't remember. Macbook chargers can also get pretty pricy compared to Thinkpad chargers, heck you can probably charge the latter from a hand-wound torch if you hook up the cables right. But these older Macbooks are still a surprisingly great option for Linux. Parts are generally available, you can upgrade the HDD and RAM and they have a great keyboard to type all your 1337 .config files on. If you see one in the wild, give it a try!

I typed this entire post on that 2010 Pro by the way. I have to say I really prefer this Macs keyboard to most Thinkpads I tried. But at the end of the day it really doesn't matter all that much what you run your Linux distro on, especially if you end up getting your device used and avoid paying a major corporation money they don't deserve. The artwork also mentions Framework, which I didn't really touch on so I'll mention it here briefly. I think its a really cool concept, but for me personally its too early to tell what will come of it. Used Framework laptops haven't really hit my market properly yet, but when they do rest assured I'll be giving them a try. Kind of reminds me of that weird Motorola concept that never happened but I hope Framework is here to stay.

I am also trying out a bit of a different style of writing and formatting again, with footnotes and more links, lets see if my Markdown parser shits itself or not. Chances are if you are reading this everything went well.

Deuces.

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[1] Newer Apple device architectures seem to have been difficult to run Linux on. I believe that will change soon, but that's still something to keep in mind.

[2] I feel like this goes without saying but this is just a generalization. It really depends on the country and the model of the device, but I'm leaning heavily on my personal experience with the companies mentioned.