SSDs are what breathe new life into old PCs. And they are quite cheap. My wife's laptop turned from extremely annoying to decent, almost pleasant to use.
For sure, but Pixel is free.
Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
51–60 of 113 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#52With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.
Sadly, JavaScript is the new Flash/Java when it comes to resources.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#53Do the power equation before you get your old PC out and include kWh for your future TCO.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#54I'm surprised they ship with chromium, I have had a much better experience with firefox than Chrome on my low end laptop. Does chromium have a smaller memory footprint than Chrome?
> Does chromium have a smaller memory footprint than Chrome?
If it does it's negligible after you disable google apps addons and flash.
Had the same experience, my old AMD semphron can't handle Chromium but Firefox runs just fine. That machine has 2GB DDR-I RAM but it is almost nonexistent CPU cache that kills it.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#55It's wonderful how the RaspberryPi foundation achieved everything the OLPC initiative--backed by huge names--tried and failed to do.
This is not a coincidence, it was the result of understanding the failures of OLPC e.g. http://www.techspot.com/article/531-eben-upton-interview/pag...
That is a nice interview. Eben Upton understood something pretty basic about manufacturing that the OLPC people aggressively ignored: economies of scale.
I can make 10,000 Raspberry Pi's for the same unit price I can make 1 million Raspberry Pis. There's a curve, of course, but that curve for the Raspberry Pi flattens very quickly.
[...]
I'm only seeing this from the outside but I think the main difficulty that OLPC encountered is that their minimum economic quantity was very high, and so they had to and get these big government orders in order to justify building enough units so they could hit their cost targets. I don't know what the minimum economic quantity for OLPC was but it was probably hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, and they had trouble to achieve that.
When it was early days for OLPC and they were receiving lots of positive press attention, I saw Nicholas Negroponte argue strenuously against selling directly to industry or the public as a distraction that was beneath the dignity of the project. At that moment, it was obvious they had no hope of hitting their $100/laptop target.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I'd argue that Internet browsing with 2GB is only suitable for reading news and email. This then is a common denominator for layman user, who then wouldn't be using Linux or Pi to begin with. However, this thread is not about Chromebook (and I agree with you there about Chromebook - my wife uses it for email/youtube browsing, and it works perfectly fine). There's a big difference between Chromebook and Linux/Pi…
One can watch youtube, play browser games and browse full web sites, and watch h.264 movies with a system that has under 1GB of ram. And your second point is almost moot since Chromebooks run on top of Gentoo Linux of all things.
ChromeOS has vetted, high quality drivers and a tightly coupled window manager layer w/fewer layers of indirection.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#57It's wonderful how the RaspberryPi foundation achieved everything the OLPC initiative--backed by huge names--tried and failed to do.
This is not a coincidence, it was the result of understanding the failures of OLPC e.g. http://www.techspot.com/article/531-eben-upton-interview/pag...
OLPC started long ago too, at their time a trigger buy price point was way off the map.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#58This will be an interesting one to watch. There's a huge number of tiny Linux distros, but most of them couldn't compete with something released by the Raspberry Pi foundation. I think their biggest competitor is lubuntu. It's just a stripped down Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop. PIXEL also uses LXDE, and it looks like they've made a few design tweaks to the file manager. They both have Chromium as the default browser.…
> "I'm wondering why they didn't just use lubuntu"
They could of, and that might have been a great idea. Although not as headline grabby as "we made a new OS!". I think that Debian probably is slightly better on PIs simply because Raspian has been running off Debian from just after the first Pi's came out, and since Debian historically supported more architectures, so maybe makes more sense from stability standpoint to build off of Debian instead of Ubuntu. I recall the creators of Raspbian saying it was actually quite difficult as it was to port Debian to RPi 1 due to the particular architecture, so starting from Lubuntu might have been a little too difficult.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#59With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.
A lot of Chromebooks are still shipping with 2GB of RAM and they do a perfectly sufficient job of running the "Internet" for most everyday users. I would argue your lower limit of a reasonable Internet browsing experience is higher than average because of your technical background. 512MB would be limiting for sure, but a machine with 2GB of RAM running a Linux desktop, especially with an SSD if possible, would make a…
Even Win10 still has a 32-bit version in fact.
Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
#60With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.
2-4GB is not enough for you? And the brand spanking new 2016 Macbook Pros default to 8GB and 2-4 is not enough on an old computer? I routinely browse the web in a 2GB Linux VM with Firefox under Windows, with less than 1GB in use on htop. It's easy to run even Ubuntu with under 200MB of RAM usage if you forgo Unity, and 500 MB with it. What hobbles the web on older hardware is not "2-4GB" but very slow processors (ha…
> What hobbles the web on older hardware is not "2-4GB" but very slow processors (having to handle all that advertising Javascript, over-animated UIs, and bloated front-end frameworks).
^ This, as someone else said in this thread - javascript is the new Flash of the web. At least in the Flash days, many web designers were descent enough to include html only versions. When I'm using my old laptop with js turned off many pages become unaccessible and web makers don't even realize that so many people in the World can't afford buying new computers.