I just recently pulled an old one of these out with linux mint installed because I needed a device that uppon receiving power boots up and plays a video loop — my usual goto raspi3 for some damned reason would not negotiate EDIDs above VGA resolution with the projector in use.

I booted the MBP after not having had it on power 4 years and it worked flawlessly. It then took maybe 20 minutes to run vlc on boot and set the propper bits to make it boot automatically when it receives power.

I cannot recall when things worked this flawlessly the last time