Did similar. A 2008 white macbook and a late 2008 unibody macbook (non-pro). It was a fun project.
The white plastic macbook is in decent shape too with just standard light scratching on the body. It was sold for parts only but worked just fine. Needed a battery replacement, and I found some old magsafe "L" chargers for cheap. Maxed out the RAM at 4GB (Supports 6GB (4G+2G) but 1pc of 4GB DDR2 are expensive).
The 2008 unibody macbook needed the lower body replaced (bad keyboard main issue) but the rest of it works fine. The original battery still worked and held some charge, but I got a 3rd party one anyway along with the magsafe "L" charger. Maxed out RAM at a usable 8GB DDR3. This was also sold dirt cheap "for parts".
Both ran MX Linux for awhile until I needed the SATA SSDs. They now sit with their old mechanical hdds and the last supported OSX versions on them. Maybe one day I'll get around to selling them.
Gnome and KDE both support RDP in recent releases. Works ok, but connecting is not as seamless as Windows, at least with mstsc.exe. I’ve found it somewhat buggy too (blank or black screens until rebooted for example.)
One of the big things holding me back was good Remote Desktop experience on Linux. Using Gnome RDP has been good enough for basic use for me.
For my family using Tailscale + Infuse (AppleTV/iOS/MacOS) works fine. I run a TrueNAS machine as my SMB target, point Infuse there and I can stream from anywhere.
Plex might have more features, but I found not having to install (plex/jfin/etc) server software worth it. To each their own.
The biggest issue with forks, which is pointed out in the article, is Mozilla still does the heavy lifting. None of the forks have the resources (and probably interest) to fully fork Firefox and make it their own codebase to maintain.
Personally, I like LibreWolf and Mullvad browser. Hopefully they can keep up to date well into the future.
These projects to my knowledge do not release patches by themselves but as you said, rely on Mozilla's work - they take Firefox, strip it out of few features - namely one's that raised concerns, toss in additional stuff from other projects and include own branding. So perhaps these are more "customized derivatives" or "spin-offs"?
Not that work of these projects isn't good - on contrary. Mozilla has violated the trust of its users in last years with features nobody ask for and those folks pluck that stuff out.
Stil, perhaps it's a time for a proper fork that provides own code maintenance, before things will go worse at Mozilla.
I love that I dont even need more software like plex or jellyfin. I just expose a smb share and point infuse to it. Usually its a windows server but using truenas atm.
I have an iMac G4 800Mhz and I could never get linux to install as the boot screen (that loads the installer) would always be solid white with light pink text. I imagine it had to do with the nvidia GPU but never bothered to debug. MacOS X and 9.2 worked fine.
I had one back when they were new / for sale. Wish I kept it.
I remember toying with the idea of doing a soldering hack that was floating around in order to overclock the system. I imagine it was moving some resistors around or something. Never did it though.
The white plastic macbook is in decent shape too with just standard light scratching on the body. It was sold for parts only but worked just fine. Needed a battery replacement, and I found some old magsafe "L" chargers for cheap. Maxed out the RAM at 4GB (Supports 6GB (4G+2G) but 1pc of 4GB DDR2 are expensive).
The 2008 unibody macbook needed the lower body replaced (bad keyboard main issue) but the rest of it works fine. The original battery still worked and held some charge, but I got a 3rd party one anyway along with the magsafe "L" charger. Maxed out RAM at a usable 8GB DDR3. This was also sold dirt cheap "for parts".
Both ran MX Linux for awhile until I needed the SATA SSDs. They now sit with their old mechanical hdds and the last supported OSX versions on them. Maybe one day I'll get around to selling them.