My 2021 M1 MacBook is still good, but my 2020 Intel MacBook Air (16GB RAM) has felt unusable since 2022 or so. After upgrading macOS past Big Sur it just got unusably slow, would randomly hang or have high idle CPU usage, battery power was short lived, and it was constantly hot. I therefore downgraded it to Catalina and was happy to have my laptop back, until Homebrew and App Store wouldn’t let me install new things anymore, then I upgraded it to the latest macOS again and found it unusable again.

Now I’m not sure whether to install Linux on it (I’ve used Linux as my main OS before the Mac), or try to downgrade to Catalina again and just build whatever software I need from source.