I tried eBay like 4 times. But they were all fake or defective. At least one of them was dead on arrival.

I finally bought one from iFixit.com. Far more expensive than eBay, but the battery actually worked great for about a year. Then about a month after the 1-year warranty expired, it degraded noticeably (maybe to 80%) with only about 100-200 charge cycles. Even iFixIt cannot source a battery as good as the original Apple.

Right now, it's at 65% capacity after 584 charge cycles, after 4.5 years of service. I will probably go back to iFixIt. At least I'll get one year of full capacity from them, instead of the fake or DOA ones from eBay.

The last time I tried this in 2022, I encountered a bunch of rough edges. I tried Ubuntu or Mint on a MBA 11 (2013 or 2015 models). Maybe Linux has gotten better since then?

For example, the fan did not work out of the box. I had to install something called 'macfanctld'.

Sleep did not work, it would wake up as soon as it went to sleep. I had to install something called a 'suspend-fix.service' hack.

Brightness control was flaky. It would always wake up at the lowest brightness setting. Disabling auto-dimming caused it to wake up at the highest brightness.

Yes, it was infuriating.

In addition to the Classic option that is shown only after hitting "Cancel", they also had a secret "Microsoft 365 Basic" option for $20/year. It includes no Office products, but provides 100 GB of OneDrive. Which is all I needed. So Microsoft is getting $20/year from me that they don't deserve.

Why do I pay them even $20/year? It's insurance against the same kind of BS from Google. I back up my Google Drive to OneDrive.

I'm not going to write things like Django, flask, requests, urllib3, numpy, scipy, mathplotlib, dateutils, and psycopg2 on my own. That would take multiple lifetimes.

Sure, you can choose to write everything yourself, but you are limiting the size, scope, and complexity of the problems that you can solve. We have to stand upon the shoulders of others to get stuff done.

I use SyncThing for that purpose. It syncs across my phone, my laptops, and my Synologies. But I don't sync all my photos.

I don't like the thought of providing Google thousands of personal photos for their AI training. Which will eventually leak to gov't agencies, fraudsters, and criminals.