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Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

engadget.com

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Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#61

Post by pjc50 »

justin66 wrote: post #55
pjc50 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes - it was the classic "big bang" project, the only options were massive worldwide success or total obscurity. It relied on top-down funding to push it to the intended users. Whereas Pi bootstrapped from tiny initial funding.

The main problem of OLPC was Segway-level hubris, in my opinion.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#62

Post by dragonwriter »

ImAGirl wrote: post #10

It's wonderful how the RaspberryPi foundation achieved everything the OLPC initiative--backed by huge names--tried and failed to do.

RPi does basically nothing that OLPC was intended to achieve, though it does a lot that OLPC wasn't intended to. OLPC, unsurprisingly, did a lot of what OLPC was intended to.

RPi did some of the things computing enthusiasts wanted OLPC to do that weren't actually OLPC goals.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#63

Post by Klinky »

benologist wrote: post #38
webwanderings wrote: post #3

With 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.

512mb - 1024mb of ram is standard in a ton of cheap Android phones and tablets, developers that are mindful of poor connectivity and hardware can still create performant experiences.

512MB on Android is unusable. They have not released such devices in years(maybe no name Chinese brands are still releasing them). Mobile platforms are also extremely honed in to the mobile ecosystem, which cannot be said for desktop OSes.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#64

Post by pjc50 »

olegkikin wrote: post #36

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.

And, especially for laptops, check the thermal management: clean the fans and vents, and if necessary redo the thermal paste.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#65

Post by Klathmon »

FreeFull wrote: post #45
olegkikin wrote: post #36

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.

SSDs and extra RAM are the two best upgrades to improve how fast and responsive everything feels.

I've found that an SSD is significantly better for most "store bought" computers/laptops.

They advertise "gigahertz", RAM, drive space, and sometimes screen size.

So everything else is left to the cheapest possible part. Updating the 5400 RPM HDD to an SSD has completely changed every single laptop a family member has brought me as "too slow to use".

I've also found it's damn near impossible to buy a cheap laptop with an SSD.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#66

Post by Klathmon »

calebsurfs wrote: post #28

I'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?

Chrome and chromium should have about the same footprint.

But IIRC chrom(ium|e) modifies it's memory usage quite a lot depending on the hardware it's running on.

If it's a low spec machine, it will disable many of the memory-hungry features and speed improvements.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#67

Post by Klinky »

olegkikin wrote: post #36

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.

This should definitely be investigated before investing time getting an alternative OS up and running, along with the troubleshooting and training that comes with it.

Upgrade to the latest CPU for the platform. For $25 you could gain an extra 1+ Ghz or more cores.

Max out ram, for DDR2 systems this is usually 4GB - 8GB. 2GB sticks can easily be had for under $10 a stick.

Replace hard drive with SSD. Especially if it's a low RPM hard drive. 128GB SSDs can be had for $35 on sale.

The above upgrades will easily boost performance whatever OS is already running on the hardware, and total time to install should be 1 - 2 hours.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#70

Post by Fuzzwah »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #35

This 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 use lubuntu on my daily drive laptop and older PCs I have laying around. I'm a huge fan.

I wanted to note that with the up coming 17.04 release it will be using the LXQt desktop environment.

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