take a look at macast, you can send it videos from e.g. your phone (youtube, jellyfin, .mp4/mkv, etc) and it uses mpv under the hood and plays it full screen. I imagine that’s what chromecast does (?) but have no experience with it as I wouldn’t let the stinky fucker on my LAN.

what you describe would be an ardous journey… if the mentioned macbooks cost like $500. or $1000. truly, that sorta thing is nothing short of masochistic and no sane person should bother with that.

you’re making broad statements based on very shitty hardware - 4 gig dual-core laptop isn’t a very representative experience when you can get solid workstations for pocket change.

the macbooks I get are in the $20 region and for that kinda “money” I get absolute top-notch quality hardware, that, although dated, is more than adequate for the vast majority of uses. spending a coupla minutes to tweak it post-install isn’t a huge price to pay.

here’s my headless 2014 MBP (i7-4770HQ with 16 GB, Intel Iris) doing its thing. was sold “for parts” due to busted screen for $25 ($40 asking).

so, yeah, dicking around with broadcom’s stack is a thing, but it’s a thing that you do once and then it just works. I’m as bleeding edge as reasonably possible (F43) on all models I run and I haven’t got any issues, akmod builds the driver on every kernel install, which if you’re doing actual work on the thing isn’t something you’re doing often.

as to how to install without LAN, you use your Android phone and tether its Wifi via USB. after five minutes (full system upgrade, install broadcom-wl via rpmfusion for e.g. Fedora) you’re done. or, use the netinstall thing the same way. there’s also a buncha stuff needed to make the experience better (undervolt, LID0 wake events, etc)

not sure about Airs but MBP 2015 models (possibly 2013/14 as well) can be retrofitted with a $5 adapter board that lets you fit a regular Intel M.2 NGFF in there, eliminating the tainted kernel issue.

zorin woulda been a solid contender if it weren’t for the crew involved and its murky path forward. but as a first, “see it ain’t that bad” step, sure.

can’t give the thing out as-is, there’s a buncha stuff in there pertaining to our infra. restructuring and refactoring it (the thing doesn’t even use roles, just a gargantuan yml file with tasks) is long overdue and I thought your query would be the thing that pushes me over the line to finally do it, but after an hour with it I gave up it’s just too big of a mess.

I had the same path as you, was irritated that maintaining idempotency of the existing bash scripts was such a huge task, so started piece by piece, one task, test, add another, etc. mainly by following jeff geerling’s guides and then venturing out on my own by reading the official docs. tried utilizing bullshitgpt on a coupla occasions, but the thing constantly made up shit that doesn’t exist costing me time I ain’t got, so I gave up on it.

400+ installs in the past four years - discarded/donated business laptops that get fixed, cleaned, upgraded with cheapest SSDs and donated to predominantly tech illiterate users.

99% is ubuntu lts + ansible playbook that removes snap, disables A TON of update naggings, installs flatpak, coupla apps and systemd timer to autoupdate all flatpaks. this is the only thing that has low support requests, everything else we tried (mint, debian, fedora) has a disproportionately higher support request frequency (reinstalls, wifi, fix this, remove that, etc).

I totally could adapt debian to be as good or even better (fedora with the bi-annual versions is right out), but one of the important caveats is the user being able to install it with minimum hassle if needed and that just would not be doable.

I’d urge everyone ITT to look at the thing through the user’s eyes and not get lost in “no true scottsman” fallacies. the goal is to convert a user over, not to demonstrate how cool you are. once they know what’s what, you can sell them on fedora and atomic and whatnot, but not as a first step.

I don’t use ubuntu, have it on none of my stuff, and wouldn’t go out with you if you do. but it’s presently the only option for beginners for use on laptops that has a semblance of a modern desktop OS.

I mean, just imagine you’re spitting game at cutie at the bar and things are cooking and you go “hit me up on hkmbljurgh” and all of a sudden fire and brimstone all around kthulu cthulhu appears wondering why you summoned him them you scream sorry bro wrong number bro kthulu goes its aight but he they missed a dentist’s appointment because of this the barkeep is now pissed who’s gonna clean this up cutie is nowhere to be found…

shoulda gone with signal is what I’m saying

thank you! I am also one of the dozens of people who can read, what are the odds we come across one another on lemmy of all places, huh?

while I have you here, would you say that giving unpronounceable welsh names to new entrants attempting to challenge established players with a decade+ strong foothold in this space is a) a prudent decision or b) hella stupid?

we got issues switching normies to signal which has been around forever, how’s tongue-breaker gonna make any progress?