Just to make sure - it’s not some cable hitting a fan in a case, right?

I’ve seen systems before where a cable is too close to a fan, and you don’t hear a noise until the fan speeds up.

Usually, you don’t need to bother much with drivers at all outside of Nvidia GPUs and Broadcom modems since the kernel is monolithic and contains most drivers.

On an ATX motherboard, I think it’s extremely rare for the ethernet chipset to require an out-of-kernel driver.

Honestly, even AMD to Intel would probably go mostly fine, considering the monolithic nature of the kernel and it having most drivers built in.

You’d probably want to make sure you have the Intel firmware package installed and make sure to remove configs specific to AMD stuff, like power management configs and kernel parameters, but it would still most likely boot.

Honestly, probably no. You’re switching to something with the same CPU generation and micro architecture, and the boards are by the same manufacturer with the same mobo chipset generation (both 5xx). It should be plug and play.

The only major change I can see the old CPU has an iGPU, while the new one doesn’t, meaning that you won’t be able to use the video port built into your motherboard, only the ports on your GPU. I’m guessing you probably weren’t using that HDMI port in the first place, so it’s probably non-issue.

EDIT: There is a small chance you’ll have to change your fstab depending on how it’s configured; if it’s done by drive UUID, it won’t be a problem.

Replace the Macbook with a Thinkpad.

I think I made the mistake of pushing my grandfather away from Linux. He’s retired but does some professional photography; he’s used Photoshop for years, but said he’s open to leaving Adobe.

One day recently, he told me he heard about “this Linux thing” and asked me if it would be a good fit and run Windows applications well. I told him his main issue was probably Photoshop, and that even switching, he’d still need some stable, consistent way to open past PSD files. In retrospect, maybe I should have looked more closely at his use case to see the complexity of his edits and if they might have worked well in another program that runs on Linux.

I think for the MS Office thing, it depends on what it’s being used for. If it’s just creating a fresh document or editing a simple existing docx, LibreOffice it totally fine; I’ve heavily exclusively used LibreOffice Writer during my time in college and been okay, as I’m either just writing in MLA or using a provided Word file that I can then just save as an ODT after initial conversion and export as a PDF when it comes time to turn it in.

However, from what I can tell, if you’re working in an organization that extensively uses MS Office, files may need to survive multiple openings and edits between multiple editors, and multiple cycles of translating between document representations can lead to degraded documents and just make your work life absolutely miserable. Thus, LibreOffice isn’t an option, though I hear there are more MS-compatible suites that are usable on Linux, though not all of them FOSS.

This is why I’ve so far left my mother alone about Linux; maybe if I saw some evidence that her workflow would be more amenable to LibreOffice than I think it is, I’d reconsider.

I usually format my external drives to exFAT since it’s fully supported R/W on all major operating systems, in the slim chance I have to use macOS.

Still, no need for the OP to reformat their drive; NTFS tends to work just fine.

I agree with other people that you should futz around with your GPU drivers and different Wayland compositors first, but also, if you ever had to reinstall, there is such thing as saving your dotfiles to significantly reduce setup time.

I don’t do that because I’m lazy, but it certainly is a thing

For reference, sharing your local IP address is a little like saying “I’m in room 223” (local IP address) and not saying what building (network) you’re in. Someone can’t walk into 223 in a different building and get to the same room you’re in.

Honestly, even if someone knew what network you were on, a local IP address wouldn’t be that useful because even if they successfully got on your network, as long as you have a properly-configured firewall and no vulnerable network-exposed services on your system, they can’t really do anything.

Honestly, while it’s still not a bright idea to tempt fate like that, even sharing your public IP isn’t that bad for the same reasons if it’s a competent home user; the worst that can happen on a properly-configured network is that someone tries and fails to exploit vulnerabilities that aren’t there and MAYBE drum up your internet bill. Also, for most ISPs, your public IP changes pretty often anyway, usually something like every few days to a week, due to changing DHCP leases.

I thought the same thing.

I mostly agree with the idea of using stable distros.

However, I will add that if you hate the default Debian installer and are willing to dig a bit through the website, they do have live USBs for each DE with a Calamares installer that I love. I really wish they would promote those more.

Honestly, they need to redo the whole Debian site.

Also, I find it funny you include 2018 in your range; I think that most things from 2018 could probably run almost any full modern distro competently, and that the better quality devices from 2015-2017 also wouldn’t struggle too much.

Debian with XFCE. It’s very stable with very little bloat compared to Ubuntu.

KDE might not run horribly, but XFCE was always snappy for me when I ran it on a similarly-aged, sinmilar performance Fujitsu Lifebook.

I’ve never even owned a Mac; I know about it because I’ve Hackintoshed a few times, so I’m familiar with OpenCore.

Really? I thought the last version for those was Monterrey and that that went EOL in 2024.

That reminds me; the other day a client walked up to the help desk I work at with a 2015 MBP still running El Capitan.

I’m confused. How did you save your parent’s Masters in Business Administration? /s

(Sorry. I can’t help but think that every time someone acronym’s Macbook Air.)

OCLP?

I will point out that the card support for ROCm has improved; AMD explicitly supports most RDNA3 or later consumer GPUs, and I think support might go back to RDNA2, maybe RDNA1.

Supposedly it’s technically possible to use Polaris, but it’s very broken at this point.

The Arch Wiki is probably the sungle most useful documentation for any Linux user; I don’t even use Arch and it’s still extremely helpful.

I could see the benefits of using Arch just so almost every function my system has is near-perfectly documented in Arch Wiki.

As for the distro itself, it has the newest packages, and often good repos with interesting packages that Debian and others may lack. It also expects you to choose and install the components you want, whereas the Debian installer will usually just install defaults; you can use Debootstrap for a minimal Debian install, but that’s not as well supported for installing Debian due to the way tools as set up on the install medium.

The reason I choose Debian over Arch is because if I don’t use a device for several months and have to install updates (like my school laptop over the summer), Debian Stable is more likely to survive that than Arch; I’ve destroyed several Arch VMs by trying to update them after not using them for months. I’m sure I could have salvaged them if I tried, but I’d rather just make a new VM.

It looks like NetBSD and OpenBSD might be good OSs for 32-bit; the next FreeBSD version is dropping support. I don’t use any BSDs, but I think a BSD is probably the best-supported modern Unix operating system for this kind of hardware as the last of the major distros drop i386.

Linux distro support is really thinning out for x86_32, so for this use case; I’m sure the distros still exist, but they’re often niche projects. Gentoo may do the trick if you want to; I can’t tell if they compile their newfangled precompiled packages for i386 though, so if they don’t, you’ll probably have to set up a cross compiling setup from a more powerful x86_64 machine, which you’d need to use every time you update.