When MacBooks are plugged in, they get their power from the charger. They are not simultaneously draining and charging the battery in general.

so when the battery is fully loaded a controller tells the mobo to stop loading the battery and to use power from the charger to simply power the notebook, is this so?

this is what sudo tlp-stat -b prints:

--- TLP 1.6.1 --------------------------------------------

+++ Battery Care

Plugin: generic

Supported features: none available

+++ Battery Status: BAT0

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/manufacturer = DP

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/model_name = bq20z451

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/cycle_count = 666

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full_design = 6330 [mAh]

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full = 5043 [mAh]

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_now = 4936 [mAh]

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/current_now = 0 [mA]

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status = Full

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_start_threshold = (not available)

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold = (not available)

Charge = 97.9 [%]

Capacity = 79.7 [%]

do you still recommend a new battery?

The most important part with batteries is to check if they start swelling up.

do you mean physically swell up? like I'm going to see it bent/bigger?

backup done

/etc/apt/sources.list point to 24.04 noble

there are 2 packages disabled on upgrade to noble: mkv and imagereader, lines are commented so nothing wrong here

do you still recommend to execute sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a?

just to be clear, you mean removing the battery, or do you mean using a command?

If you’re gonna use Linux then go ahead and replace the battery so that you’re not worrying about it failing miserably to communicate with the charge controller or battery itself and tell you when telhe thing is fucked and need replacing.

I'm already using linux, macos was nuked.

I don't understand this paragraph. Do you mean new batteries for this model (macbook pro from 2014) work better with linux?

hi, thanks for your input.

Small breakthrough: I booted the system without problems to tty1 (I believe this is called single user mode), logged in as an old user and now I can see all my data, logged in as old me. Do you still recommend to backup from live usb and upgrade from there?

NMTUI shows that wlan works

after trying suggested command

sudo dpkg --configure -a

I get:

error processing package install-info (--configure): installed install-info package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 127, errors were encountered while processing install-info

it seems there is no -a option for dpkg-reconfigure:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a returns unknown option -a

if I delete -a it asks for a package to reconfigure

Does mount /home improve that ?

no

Im reading about nmtui

feel free to suggest other approaches

in recovery mode as root I executed:

mount -o remount,rw /

mount --all

then cd'ed to /media/home, ls'ed and got no results.

I also don't know if changes to make the system writable are made on the go or if I have to reboot. I rebooted and the system is still in read only mode.

ETA: another command that might be relevant:

dpkg --configure -a

returns

error processing package install-info (--configure), installed install-info package post installation script subprocess returned error exit status 127

dmesg prints a large log that I cannot copy, the only red lines I read regard bluetooth, but the log is huge and I can only see a fraction of it.

I can cd to /var/log and ls it, what file do I have to open? or what do I do now?

I purged the broken package with sudo dpkg -P libfreerdp2-2 and immediately afterwards I executed sudo apt get upgrade. It unleashed a list of 96 packages to upgrade totaling 900 MB of data.

However, if I press yes on ‘do you want to continue?’ wlan seems to be off:

E: failed to fetch http… initramfs-tools-core… could not connect to 127.0.0.1, connection refused.

(I can write the whole address if you need it)

how do I enable wlan as root from initramfs?

Small breakthrough: I booted the system without problems to tty1 (I believe this is called single user mode), logged in as an old user and now I can see all my data, logged in as old me. Do you still recommend to backup from live usb and upgrade from there?

NMTUI shows that wlan works