Ubuntu 24.04 on an EXTREMELY Minimal Mac

Go to bit.ly/4aCuT5P for the incredible Autofull M6 Gaming Chair!
I have an old 2009 Mac Mini that just so happens to have the EXACT minimum system requirements for the latest version of Ubuntu just released. But how well will it really work?
Thanks ‪@BranchusCreations‬ for the cameo as always!
VIDEO LINKS:
🍎 Ubuntu 24.04 - ubuntu.com/dow...
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#AutoFull #AutoFullM6gamingchair #gamingchair

[@ActionRetro]

Go to bit.ly/4aCuT5P for the incredible Autofull M6 Gaming Chair!

[@AtomicOverdrive]

I got a loaded 2012 mac mini I am wanting to put 24.04

[@SonicBoone56]

This chair legit looks awesome, especially to play handheld games with like you showed with that Sega Game Gear, instead of having to lay in bed to avoid neck and arm fatigue.

[@AWIRE_onpc]

no

[@JeremyBolanos]

Nice chair, I wonder what the load-bearing capacity is? I'm on my 3rd new chair in 2 years. Hoping the current one lasts long enough for my diet pill to bring things down.

[@jacobmckenna8661]

Please teach me how you time travel

[@JeffGeerling]

Someone at Canonical must still be rocking that machine for their workstation. They will give it up kicking and screaming 😂

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

hey wake up new ubuntu's balls just dropped and you can enjoy it now🤣🤣🤣

[@SonicBoone56]

One must wonder what kind of stickers or novelty items are sitting on top of it after all these years. Probably has its own badge at this point.

[@DiligentUIM]

Oh you already know ‘ 😂

[@DiligentUIM]

I have a Mac Pro 4,1 that I flashed to a 5,1 so I could use newer” (for that tower ) CPU , and ram , plus more programs to enable amd access , I have a rx480 in it and it would blow your mind can play gta 5 60 frames , gta 4 runs solid , destiny runs at 160 fps , some games eh some aren’t bad , I got it very cheap , want to put a rx580 or maybe something better by amd that’s compatible with it ! It handles shit like a beast nothing like the Mac mini 😂😂

[@hyperturbotechnomike]

I still use Core2Quad machins as bedroom HTPC, because i custom built a 0db cooling solution for the CPU and graphics card (Radeon 7750 Low Profile) They are CNC milled parts with tons of heatpipes in a modified Silverstone Grandia case. The performance is still good enough for 1080p video playback and some bedsurfing. It was our living room HTPC before we moved into our ugly brick bunker, where we decided to get a 4K projector. Our living room HTPC is a new i3 12100F and an RTX 3060Ti (for decoding 4K high refresh rate and upscaling), which is not 0db but close to it. The graphics card is hooked up to three 360mm external radiators behind the media shelf.

[@FurbleFawks]

That Mac Mini may be old enough to drive but it'd not be very safe. It's got terrible iSight.

[@sweetsweetkhajoor]

lmao

[@funnystoriesshorts481]

Ha ha. (ok but that was funny)

[@gentuxable]

Don't worry it's so small, very unlikely you'll have any FaceTime!

[@nxx99]

ba dum tss

[@darkstatehk]

I'm running 24.04 on an old iMac from 2007. Changed the HDD to an SSD (that was a fun exercise). Runs smooth as butter for daily use.

[@impossiblescissors]

Not wanting to bother with tearing that beast apart, I've been running Linux Mint off a USB SSD. But there's definitely a performance penalty.

[@enderteck3273]

​@@impossiblescissorsthey're not talking about USB here, but swapping the HDD to an SSD.

[@spazzypengin]

@@impossiblescissors I put Mint Xfce on my sister's 2013 iMac so it could be a dedicated streaming machine. So far so good!

[@archgirl]

@@enderteck3273I think you misread his comment. He knows that, and was just explaining that _he_ didn’t want to take his apart to swap an SSD in so he runs it from external storage.

[@enderteck3273]

@@archgirl Lol didn't get the "not wanting to tear the beast apart" part

[@ErikTheHalibut]

I like the mac mini form factor. They are nice and stackable.

[@lunadelinte]

how many do you have lol

[@ErikTheHalibut]

@@lunadelinte I had 10 older Intel Mac minis at one point, got them all from an eBay seller looking to get rid of them cheaply (about $300 for all combined). I used them for awhile as a Linux kubernetes cluster, then ended up giving them to friends & family because the cloud exists.

[@ArielMarcelo]

They stack up really nice in the trash

[@定义]

Surprising, how a 2024 operating system can be ran on an old minimal 2009 mac mini, especially with the GNOME shell.

[@CommodoreFan64]

that's because with enough RAM, and a basic SSD GNOME is not as heavy as people think it is, nor is Wayland compositor, but yes it's more heavy than the older X11 compositor just not by a ton. I have Manjaro GNOME running on a couple older ASUS dual core I3 laptops for family members just fine.

[@seshpenguin]

@@CommodoreFan64 KDE too has made a huge amount optimization over the years, so much so that it's usually preferable now to traditionally light DEs like XFCE or MATE when it comes to RAM usage.

[@CommodoreFan64]

@@seshpenguin We are talking about GNOME here not KDE, but thanks for the input. 🙄

[@nothingtoseeherelolkek]

@@seshpenguinbut not in supporting old hardware :D

[@turkcex]

kde is bad, gnome is good

[@mzs112000]

The Firefox CPU usage on KZbin can be fixed by installing h264ify. The nVidia GPU can decode H.264 video, but not VP9 or AV1. So with some tweaks to Firefox you can force it to only accept h.264 videos and render them using the GPU, which will help a lot on a machine that old

[@mikehosken4328]

I’ve just installed Debian and xfce on mine, works fantastic.

[@johnruschmeyer5769]

If you add the nvidia-legacy PPA, you should be able to install the nvidia-340 drivers for your GPU. Officially, nVidia driopped support for the 9600 a while ago, but the community maintains patches for the kernel module to let it work with newer kernel versions.

[@johnruschmeyer5769]

That may also resolve your framerate issues with sauerbraten.

[@JustinTire]

An interesting PC without Haiku? Who are you and what did you do to Sean?!

[@GenmaKragoth]

Was just going to say that it looks like a perfect machine to run Haiku on.

[@jgriff3004]

im more worried about what happened to whiteboard guy

[@newq]

Am I the only one who loves the idea of Haiku more than Haiku itself? You know, it's really cool that they made a completely novel OS that's not related to any other major OSes and it's actually functional, and I'm all for reviving 90s UI conventions for impractical, aesthetic reasons, but... it's a very dated design for a very dated workflow. It'd be cooler if you could swap out that default shell for something more modern. I absolutely love how lightweight it is. I mean, that's really cool. I hope people make alternate desktop environments for it someday.

[@JustinTire]

@@newq Most people prefer that "dated" design over the newer ones. The older KZbin designs were a lot less crowded than the new one. On smaller displays (like 768p) you can only fit 8 video thumbnails at a time but that same screen 10 years ago could fit like 20 or something

[@buckeye43210]

I installed Proxmox as the base OS and installed Haiku as a VM.

[@BrianJones-wk8cx]

Picked one of these up back in ‘09 for use with the living room TV as a DVD player, retro game emulation station, and hub to store and play digital media. With a 1080p screen, it was PERFECT. I still have it setup with Snow Leopard, all my ROMs, and a front end launcher to make for a seamless “console” experience. It’s easy to forget how fast Snow Leopard boots (especially on an SSD), and thinking about digging out one of my old CRTs and fashioning a retro arcade cabinet with this very machine. Hard to believe this kind of machine is already so retro! Great coverage, as always!

[@teklife]

running an os that old is really asking for trouble. it's not been maintained in ages and is a security vulnerability

[@BrianJones-wk8cx]

@@teklife totally-the machine NEVER goes online and has ZERO personal info on it. Emulators, ROMs, and front end-that’s it.

[@mattelder1971]

I'm running Zorin 17.1 on the very next model of Mac Mini (4,1) and it runs silky smooth, almost like it was made for the computer. It's amazing how a brand new operating system can breathe life into an old system.

[@baroncalamityplus]

I half expected to see Wolfenstein.

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

on ubuntu well you can run it on ubuntu but that wouldn't even come close to stressing the old mac so no Wolfenstein for you he's pushing it harder then that for giggles

[@DiligentUIM]

@@SaraMorgan-ym6ueyeah he’s pushing it 😂

[@DiligentUIM]

@@SaraMorgan-ym6ueyou think windows 7 takes more from cpu than Ubuntu ?

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

​​ @DiligentUIM in what reality on what drug combo did you use to come up with that?

[@DiligentUIM]

@@SaraMorgan-ym6ue lmfao the question ?

[@ShmuggumsMcGee]

I would not use the snap version of Steam. Valve said to use the official deb or even the flatpak, as there are reports of catastrophic bugs from the snap version.

[@minty_Joe]

Oh snap!

[@sweetsweetkhajoor]

snaps are trash

[@vlc-cosplayer]

Extremely common Snap L

[@SonicBoone56]

There's something really charming about these old Mac Minis I swear. If Ubuntu is too much for it, Xubuntu is probably still perfectly fine on it.

[@lejoshmont2093]

I was kind of surprised to see a dual core as a minimum requirement. Hopefully xubuntu would support the slightly older single cores still.

[@CapTVchilenaShootingStarMax]

Gotta love the x86-64 architecture.

[@vlc-cosplayer]

An architecture only its creators could love 😌

[@yorkan213swd6]

Surley no. Once you got apple silicon/ARM you never go back. i run a mac mini m1 low spec and this thing flies for everyday usage incl. no noise. I even installed vmware fusion + ubuntu 24.04.

[@xenotiic8356]

@@yorkan213swd6 I think they mean for compatibility + upgradability

[@gentuxable]

Again Thanks AMD! Imagine Intel would have forced Itanium on us just next year!

[@Bob_D]

Great Video. I've historically struggled with Linux (as I'm a total novice). But after seeing your video, I gave it a go with my 2011 Mac Mini and it worked perfectly! Thanks Sean! Love your vids... Keep up the great work.

[@cleanycloth]

I have a 2010 Mac Mini I upgraded to the hilt - 240GB SSD, 8GB RAM, and it's got a decent Core 2 Duo onboard with nVidia 320M graphics. It's not a bad little machine at all and the unibody form factor with a DVD drive is really neat. I wish they made M series Macs with blu-ray drives, that would be cool! There's plenty of space in there for one these days...

[@loxo5526]

I also have a Macmini 2010 that was gifted to me by an univerity teacher. He Upgraded the RAM to 8GB and upgraded the HDD to a 500 GB Crucial SSD. Windows 10 runs quite good on it, I used it as my main PC for two+ years. By the way that builtin DVD drive it's just a CD ROM drive used just to install MacOSX, if you wanted a real DVD drive, you had to buy the Magic Drive (classic Apple being greedy)

[@yolahola1]

I always put really lightweight distros on these old Macs, like Artix. A lightweight distro with a desktop manager like KDE makes these little things seem like modern lower end computers. I use a 2014 Mac Mini as an SMB server, but it certainly can do more than that!

[@eugiblisscast]

I just got gifted one of these, I'll definitely try this out!

[@pilotsmoe]

The reason it took so long to boot the live image is because you're limited to USB 2.0 speeds, as USB 3 didn't come out until 2011

[@flp322]

Remember when we had to wait while we booted off CD (accompanied by the requisite drive noises, of course)? Good times…

[@annieworroll4373]

Love that design. I've got a 2006 Mini. Served me well for quite some time.

[@RamLaska]

3:33 "Fiiiine Corinthian Leaaaather!"

[@ACTD_Official]

What a coincidence! my Dad just ordered a Late 2006 Mac Mini! I plan to run 10.4 on it.

[@timfireblade]

You can upgrade the CPU on those.

[@ACTD_Official]

@@timfireblade Yeah! I heard! I've been thinking about it.

[@timfireblade]

Fitted a T7200 to mine.

[@ShaneDeal]

I liked this form of the Mac Mini best, had the first gen PPC one and loved it.

[@chuckdbell1]

Great video, that was my very first Mac. It was touted as Apple's first sub $500 computer, I believed i paid $499 for it the year it released, growing up with Tandy's and then Windows clones it was my first exposure to Macintosh. I haven't used anything else since. Professionally or personally. I'm about to go dig it out of storage and install Ubuntu!

[@WilliamHaisch]

1:41 Ah, yes, back when putting enough ports on a Mac was acceptable! 😂

[@AnimalFacts]

The last time I tried to install Ubuntu, it worked great as a live image, but had all sorts of issues once installed.

[@KaitenKenbu]

Pretty fantastic chair advert, I especially like the floating paper demonstration ha.

[@rigues]

Pretty impressive! This would make a fine "lab" computer for looking up information and managing files.

[@themagicguy1]

it's pronounced: Ooh - Boon - Too The letter “U” has the same phenome in each instance, it is not pronounced Uh- Bun-Two with three different “U” pronunciation. Love your channel!

[@bananapl0]

I just installed Ubuntu Server 24.04 a week ago on one of these. It was kind of a pain because the bootloader was getting messed up by the mac firmware, but now, it's a really capable server, running some Docker instances and more.

[@Nathan15038]

The funny part is this Mac mini is actually old enough to probably start its first year of high school there growing up so fast😂

[@JohnSchiavoneJrBSEERN]

Love using older macs!

[@jnzooger]

I have the g4 version of that Mac mini, plus an i7 2014 Mac mini and an M1 Mac mini.

[@kaitoharrison872]

Not gonna lie, nowadays, anything lower than 8GB ram and I will avoid any distro with full desktop environment like gnome (default for ubuntu) and just go with a standalone window manager like sway.

[@CommodoreFan64]

if you have a 1/2 decent dedicated GPU, and a strong dual core Solus Budgie still on X11 compositor will run fine on 4GB of system RAM for daily task(found an HP slimline at the recycle, and the max the BIOS will take is 4GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM), but normally I agree that 8GB should be the minimum.

[@wikwayer]

​@@CommodoreFan64I do remember having good time with Solus KDE 5 not sure the same could be archived with version 6.

[@CommodoreFan64]

@@wikwayer As I said Solus w/Budgie DE as that's their flagship DE. Having said that they are working on moving from X11 to Wayland, so only time will tell if Budgie remains as lightweight.

[@fumo7887]

This was my first Mac. Loved it because I walked into an Apple Store and bought the cheapest one they offered... perfect for getting my feet wet. To this day, I didn't know it had Gigabit Ethernet. I was ready to comment that you misspoke, but darn it, you're right!

[@TetrisMaster512]

Gigabit ethernet is surprisingly old. Like even my old Quicksilver G4 has support for it.

[@ArielMarcelo]

From Mac OS to Linux, what an awesome upgrade. Almost makes a Mac worth it.

[@finnley24]

i just installed Ubuntu 24 on my laptop, and damn it’s beautiful

[@jammcat]

Running a maxed out Mac mini (with SSD) just like this w/ EndeavourOS as a smarter smartTV/Media centre. Love the I/O. Works great! :)

[@anthurestaos647]

Great, I like those older Machines so much too ❤

[@miapepsi]

I run arch one one of these 09 Mac minis, such a treat for how cheap they can be

[@yokingboii]

Btw just a tip, theres alot of settings and optimised clients for minecraft to run it on low end pcs, the default vanilla client is pretty clunky on low end hardware so thats why it wasnt that smooth :)

[@lelwani]

Old Macs and Linux, cannot think of a better combo for the morning. Thanks for the vid!

[@CommodoreFan64]

Move over to Solus on this older hardware, and you might see better performance, as SNAP packages are more heavy on resources than they should be.

[@Professorke]

I installed Emmabuntüs on my old 2012 MacMini expanded with 1TB ssd and 10GB ram, and the thing runs like a new machine. Fast and with no hiccups. I did have to use an adapter for that 1TB NMVe ssd. I thoroughly enjoyed that upgrade and installation 😀

[@TheSulross]

I come to this channel to get answers to the great questions that keep me up at night - Thanks Action Retro

[@RickUsesComputers]

The wifi issue has to do with non open-source drivers. Ubuntu defaults to open-source drivers and Apple only has proprietary drivers. There is a driver app in Ubuntu where you can install proprietary drivers from.

[@Sylvan_dB]

Nice! I have one of those... maybe mid-2009 so the middle clock speed. I added the maximum ram and it was a great machine. But the hard disk died... I bet one of these old sata ssd in a box on the shelf would revive it.

[@obsoletepowercorrupts]

Check your mouse has no problems like corroded or dulled connections or short-circuit wiring _(or breaking wiring)_ or tinning solder. That mouse might work fine in the USB port if it is plugged into it via a mains-powered USB hub. The symptoms are akin to a lack of power. On the other hand, you might want to check the caps and resistors or soldering or corrosion or dulling of the metal connections. That too could impair a power input-output _(but of course there are also gadgets and multimeters that cold test it)_ and make a mouse lag. A keyboard is another on to test in it for lag _(as in some standard qwerty MSWindows keyboard)._ Interesting how the Wifi _(and at that bluetooth, and all NIC, including RJ45 ethernet LAN)_ don't have a wrapper class _(such as NDISWrapper_or_Ubuntu_custom_wrapper)_ on the Ubuntu ISO considering all Mac computers are a known quantity for components. It would be interesting to see if RAM upgrading could make a difference on that machine such as for browser tabs or humble QEMU usages. MineTest as an alternative testing comparison to Minecraft would seem to make sense for your Mac mini Ubuntu box you have there, ya know. Also a DVD or CD of UT2004 _(Unreal-Tournament 2004, with its Linux install and, as such, no need for it to use WINE or proton, etc.)_ would be good when patched at 64bit for the dual-core usage it then comes with. Thereby, it should be reasonable, especially with community mods. On a side-note _(or as an aside),_ talking about linux and FOSS, maybe ask your viewers to take a look at the Free Software Foundation ORG article _"We need your help to release the LibrePlanet 2024 videos"_ in their site (14th May) because they know some of their fans and supporters watch the video streaming and they made a boob and failed to record its conference footage by means of a disk error or drive problem, and they need help if anybody has a copy to send them _(such as a video file in some sort of whatever format, be it ogg-vorbis-theora or mpeg4 or vp9 or whatever)_ to dig them out of their whole. The electronic mail is "campaigns" for the FSF suffix. They need assistance. One cannot help but wonder if you get that wrapper-class if their video catastrophic situation is resolved by them getting help with the video streams footages. I heard about this after my donation ended up with their standards updating comms coming my way as per usual _(which is fine and handy like this)._ So consider following suit if you so desire. My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.

[@stoerre]

My old Toshiba Satellite L505-S5990 is about 14 years old. I got tired of the incompatibility due to the age of the preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, so I installed Arch-based Manjaro, deciding that the Windows 7 operating system and everything that I had installed on it wasn't worth my hardware's time, and that they could burn in hell. It's been about 20 hours since I installed this new operating system, and so far it's been working fine without noticeable hiccups, unless a bunch of website ads load or I'm doing something intensive. Due to the open-source nature of these projects and the simplicity of their designs, the operating systems are inherently lightweight, and these old computers can mostly handle them without problems. Don't fret too much if you want to install something new on your computer. Mine has 3 GB of RAM, and that operating system works perfectly well.

[@burts06]

This is the Action Retro equivalent to Michael MJD running windows 11 on the 2010 Alienware laptop

[@hyperturbotechnomike]

The late 2000's had the best aesthetics in terms of apple products. It's a shame the white plastic tends to turn into this brown colour. And yes it's aluminium, because magnesium is not magnesum.

[@WalkerArt-64]

Hey, that’s (Nearly) the same Mac Mini as mine! Rocking a late 2009 server with a dualboot between Mint and Snow Leopard :)

[@WalkerArt-64]

To be fair the server had two hard drives (Which I then replaced with SSDs, Snow Leopard feels wonderful with one so dual booting is a lot easier. I just have it for the nostalgia. Tbf I should probably put the Linux SSD somewhere else, probably in my FX6300 build

[@GeppyZ]

Nice video! Love the look of these Mac Minis. Tip though, switch to fastfetch instead of neofetch, neofetch hasn’t been supported for a couple of years and has been archived by the dev.

[@hyun-shik7327]

This is the perfect cheap little KZbin and DVD player!

[@timtechtube]

I bought a GTX 960m laptop without a power supply for dirt cheap. I went and bought a chinese replacement. The replacement started smoking and then stopped working. I spliced the barrel jack onto that exact 110w power supply. My friend still uses that charger and laptop as his main computer to this day.

[@XuqingKuang-d7c]

I'm running Ubuntu Way 24.04 on my macbook air 2015 gen, it used about 800M RAM after startup, which is great.

[@abyjohns91]

I am using ubuntu 22.04 on iMac (27 Inch) with intel chip (late 2015). Works fine. I am loving it.

[@HungryManticore]

Here's an idea: Install Snow Leopard on it and use it as a gaming machine for early MacOS 10 games, including PowerPC titles. And make it dual boot with an older version of Windows, to see how it plays Windows games from that period. It should support XP, Vista and 7 natively. I'd personally go for Vista, just for the sake of fun!

[@sinisterpisces]

I was abducted into Wintelland during this period. How as the PowerPC emulation on these?

[@HungryManticore]

@@sinisterpisces When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel, MacOS had something called Rosetta, a compatibility layer that allowed running MacOS X PowerPC apps and games on Intel processors. It's similar to modern day Rosetta 2, during the current transition from Intel to ARM (that's why you can run Intel apps on the M-series chips). Snow Leopard was the last version of the OS that came with Rosetta; after that, Apple dropped support for PowerPC programs completely.

[@sinisterpisces]

@@HungryManticore Thanks. :) I remember that part. I just don't remember how well Rosetta 1 worked. I didn't come back to Macs from Wintel land until the switch to Intel was well over.

[@something2sea]

@@sinisterpiscesRosetta 1 worked well. It’s rare to find PowerPC titles for macOS 10 that don’t work on snow leopard; most of them work perfectly. The only time you’d need proper PowerPC hardware is if you’re wanting to run classic macOS software by natively booting MacOS 9. These days the classic environment can be emulated pretty well-even on Apple Silicon Macs.

[@swagmuffin9000]

are the ISO files still available?

[@JapanPop]

If you find the Yutani core, perhaps the USB ports will complement. 😂

[@bigbingge9424]

My MacMini is 2012. Just installed Ubuntu 20.04. Still great computer for my job.

[@riccardooro903]

This type of old macchines are awesome to become a linux master of customization

[@Txm_Dxr_Bxss]

I got a white MacBook with these Specs. I tried Linux Mint on it.

[@JCCyC]

I'm waiting for the Mint-ization of 24.04. Screw Snap.

[@finkelmana]

You know if you think about it, we have reached the point where retro computers arent retro. You can swap out a modern computer with a maxed out 20 year old computer. We are "computer people, and would definitely notice" but the "Average Joe" would not see much of a difference, if all he is doing is running office apps and browsing the web.

[@mmpsp693]

As "appliances", in other words a one application at a time device, old machines are quite usable. But the instant you are using several apps developed with web technologies on top of your main app (coding, office, media creation), they are useless. Funny how we traded 20 years of hardware development for the convineance of Spotify, Slack and KZbin.

[@miguimau]

I have a 3.1 Mac Mini like that and it's a very reliable Mac. I put a SSD and a secondary drive in the DVD slot +8 GB RAM and it works just fine.

[@onigvd77]

i have the 1.66Ghz mini, and about to upgrade it to a core duo. i love the minis as you can grab a few to represent the different Mac eras and have multiple working systems dedicated to mac os 9 and above, without loosing your desk space in the process :)

[@hyun-shik7327]

As a retro Apple collector, I really need to get into these. They're dirt cheap and I can use my much newer and cheaper keyboards and mice for a surprisingly modern experience.

[@mikespangler98]

I was wondering if a core 2 duo was still supported. Now I know. I have a late 2009 mini as well.

[@mikespangler98]

By the way, I confirmed the USB Oddness. USB ports two and three do work better with the mouse than the others. It must be the internal hub priority. I never noticed before. Given the rate that old CPUs are being dropped I'm still surprised the Core 2 Duo is supported in kernel 6.x. By the way again, although the 2009, 2010, and 2011 minis are USB 2, they also have FireWire 800 for external drives. The 2012 and later are USB 3.

[@ashers2224]

The slowness is just the Ubuntu iso, I had a computer with a 8 core cpu and it still took a lot of time to boot.

[@sergiostanislauskas8985]

I'm using one of these 2009 with Ubuntu as a daily driver. What is really lacking in this video is the Broadcom wifi Bluetooth driver installation which is also not that difficult and improves a lot the overall experience . A suggestion; use it just with some local installed office work suite and for web browsing .... no games work fine in this old dude...

[@inputoutput-hd7jl]

You mentioned how gnome was snappy. Idk how but the wizards at gnome have made it super efficient on low end graphics as long as you have enough ram(they've also slimmed it down in that way but it's not the lightest)

[@glaz126]

When i saw 24.04 I knew I had to download it on my ThinkPad.

[@rickkarrer8370]

Good catch on the USB ports.

[@bdwilcox]

Issue is most likely caused by USB ports controlled by the Intel chipset versus USB ports attached to a 3rd party controller chip from the likes of Realtek, Renesas, ASMedia, etc.

[@GeekmanCA]

Thumbs up for The Long Dark!

[@NathanDarkson984]

iirc, Linux Mint (an Ubuntu LTS based distro) would be running fine on the Mac Mini, to be specific on what DE you'd use would be either XFCE or MATE (GNOME 2), considering how lightweight they are in comparison to KDE Plasma, GNOME or Cinnamon, though this differs. And as for the Nvidia drivers, I think you need to specifically install a certain driver to use the old GPU to its fullest...not so sure, but this is to be certain from my experience at the very least.

[@abdelali9279]

I mean, it may be a cool email and youtube machine for someone's grandparents

[@Jonteponte71]

Great news for my late 2011 dual core mac mini that I have been racking my brain on what to do with. I had a hunch Ubuntu would run, but not maybe the latest version!?

[@PlanetLinuxChannel]

Yeah, I think some of those graphical glitches were due to the open-source GPU drivers. Maybe it’s possible to install an older version of the proprietary ones from the NVIDIA site or a PPA? Might not be ideal, but could provide a better gaming experience.

[@poeskey]

I have an a1176 from 2006, and I have setup 18.04 LTS lubuntu on it, installed plex media server and turned off the gui and honestly its not too bad. its rocking a T5600, i think its 1.83ghz, 3gb of ram (It can take 4gb but even under linux idk if it will support the full 4gb or just the 3gb. I ripped out the super drive, and the wifi and bluetooth card. I am planning to put a bigger desktop fan in there where the dvd combo drive was, I also put a crystalHD card where the wifi card was but I found out it is no longer supported. So far its been running pretty good, but I wouldnt mind upgrading to i think its a t7200, also slap in a ssd which I havent done yet.

[@Nukle0n]

Thermal paste is probably turned to dust after 16 years, might not be so glitchy if that's replaced.

[@z_polarcat]

I’ve been using the 2010 core 2 duo unibody Mac mini as my media center pc (Plex mainly) since I bought in that year, recently I upgraded the ram to 8gb and now I run Ubuntu server in a virtual machine to run docker containers such as home assistant, twin gate and several others, the fans runs quietly too!

[@Janethedoodoobrainlol]

I'm currently commenting and watching this video on an iMac G5 with a 2ghz processor and 1 gig of ram. It's unrelated I just thought it was neat to mention.

[@TimurTripp2]

I use one as a server running Debian Linux, the exact same model too! Fun coincidence. And still a perfectly usable server for low-traffic sites, even running modern containerized apps.

[@MrHurley-w5r]

I think this was the fall-back for Ununtu-TV , it would’ve been nice to have seen Ubuntu-to taking shape?

[@DaiAtlus79]

from my experience, most Intel hardware of this period, GPU or CPU, are usually supported at the Kernal level, hence why it uses Nouveau. You sure it's not running an Nvidia GPU? also on older hardware, use the H264ify extension in your browser, KZbin defaults to a format that will look for AV1 hardware first and then force the CPU to pick up the slack when it's not found, whereas H264ify gives you the H264 stream the HTML5 player has access to, and that will get played by the hardware - if it's there, Intel was the worst in this era for not having that capability in mobile hardware, and your rig (and anything else not a Xeon workstation) were usually running Centrino mobile Core 2 Duos and mainly an onboard GPU like the Radeon 2900XT like in my 8,1 iMac (still kicking with Mojave tanks to DosDude1) or some Mac Minis had Nvidia 9000 series GPUs. if i may ask, from one Sean to another, did you look for Additional Drivers in the settings? Radeon will go by default if its ATI like Nouveau will for Intel but Nouveau will also do it for Nvidia if you dont get it to be sought out by other means. Back in 2016 i had an old Dell LGA775 Pentium 4 (hyperthreaded, 3ghz 64bit) with 4gb DDR3 and a 256mb Nvidia 7600GS, and it ran the then-current Xubuntu AND Elementary OS with Nvidia drivers, albeit i used X.Org-Edgers PPA as i found those performed better. It served as my bedroom HTPC, with a 1024x768 LCD monitor where the keyboard and mouse sat in front of, and a 27" Toshiba CRT via S-video out from the 7600 GS. tl; dr - dig deeper, you would be surprised at the gains with older hardware in Linux when you use better drivers you didnt even know you had access to as well as a few tweaks to take a load off the CPU.

[@obossus]

it wolud be intresting to see a video about some wierd sandwich PC/104 builds

[@tomsittler1791]

I just bought a G4 mini and a 2GHz Core2 Mini 2,1 for $60 a couple weeks ago. Half the fun was getting them to work with modern solid-state storage solutions (the PPC one anyway) but they're definitely a good cheap intro to computing, or a cheap server box.

[@ahmadkhaled7497]

I have an aging hp G62-B31ee laptop with 4gbs of ram and gen 1 core i3. Two days ago I've added a 240gb cheap ssd and now it's running zorin os. The device was meant to be an office and still serves... Salute to linux!

[@skeleton_craftGaming]

I mean the fact that it's Apple history devalues it... [Only joking a little there; okay I was joking a little bit more that I like to admit, in fact I would say I was mainly joking]

[@MikesFutureRetro]

Sean, great video, but a few things… slow the video down a bit. Explain between a 32 and 64 EFI bootable Mac & distro … maybe explain how to dual boot in detail with grub or refind boot loader. It should boot in a way that the user can pick either Mac or Linux.

[@Nukle0n]

That slow boot is probably the USB 2.0

[@richardzee8994]

That head banging scene

[@lian_drake]

7:51 oh god no the Steam snap no, oh god oh god

[@user-cl7cg8pe3u]

Brilliant machines for Raspbian OS or for remote backups

[@AdamAve93]

To be honest I haven't used ubuntu since 2012 so I decided to dual boot the newest update of budgie on my laptop I got back in 2014 and I gotta say it's definitely an improvement and I like it more than windows. Now if only unreal 5 would work with it.

[@deanstyles2567]

Thanks, I had stuff planned, now I'm tempted to get my old MacBook Pro out of storage and install Linux on it 🙂 That Broadcom wireless card, yuck. I can vouch for those things working the CPU hard, just browsing used to spike up CPU usage.

[@seshpenguin]

I use this same generation Mac Mini as a HTPC running Windows 7 and honestly it's a great machine for it