Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
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Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
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Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#2I am finding NetBSD works better on old computers than Linux. The differences are not too great. They are basically all based on the same POSIX standards.
Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#3This article strikes me largely as, someone else should be doing this for me so I can benefit from their hard work. It's as if they miss the point of Linux, free software, etc...
This problem exists because people, like this author, who are in to vintage systems aren't taking up the mantle to maintain a distribution to support their old systems. It's like they want the benefit with zero effort. Become a leader, start the work and organize a community to take your favorite distribution and make it work on your legacy system.
Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#4I'm as opposed to throwing away machines as the author is, but I also recognise that anything with less than 1 GB of RAM is unusable in this day and age. Modern websites are simply too large to handle on such equipment, and most people do their work online.
Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#5Keeping support for near 20 year old consumer grade machines in the kernel seems ridiculous to me. Doing so would bloat the size of the kernel even more than it already is. The more code you have the easier it is for bugs and vulnerabilities to creep in.
When people write articles about moving old computers to windows to Linux they generally don't mean 20 year machines. You wouldn't even be able to run a modern browser with 256 mb of ram
Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#6Slackware or NetBSD would run perfectly.
For Slackware, enable ZRAM:
wget -O /etc/rc.d/rc.zram https://raw.githubusercontent.com/otzy007/enable-zRam-in-Slackware/master/etc/rc.d/rc.zram
sed -i 's,1024,512,g' /etc/rc.d/rc.zram
chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.zram
echo '/etc/rc.d/rc.zram start' >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
You won't need Plasma or XFCE. For sure. Deselect them, as lightweight apps are more than enough. Setup Slackbuild thru sbotools. Then, sboinstall icewm and configure it:
- IceWM. Edit the preferences so the fonts match the GTK3 theme. "fc-list | grep fontname" will help you on that.
- Some matching IceWM and GTK3/2 theme. Metal2 from IceWM matches perfectly the Solaris 8 theme from B00merang, Google/DDG it.
- XFE as the file manager, the colour scheme can be changed with ease so it matches the GTK3 colours.
- "udiskie &" in ~/.icewm/startup.
- "nm-applet &" appended to the same file.
- Seamonkey as the web browser, with UBo Legacy.
- AlienBOB has a Chromium build, and I have a huge envvar for Chromium in order to be run fast on machines with at least 1GB of RAM. It's too large in order to be posted here, but I can post it under a separate self-answer to this post.
- Audacious as the audio player, SMplayer for videos.
- For gaming, Slackware has several Slackbuilds with light games. And Wine with multilib.
- Ted/Gnumeric make an amazing and lightweight alternative to LibreOffice.
Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#7Linux has done no such thing. The author is complaining about specifically Linux distributions with graphical user interfaces.
"Linux developers are suffering from the Microsoft disease. Namely, they seem to be too busy chasing the latest fads"
This is also a ridiculous statement. It has traditionally always been Microsoft that wasn't chasing the latest fads. Microsoft has always been late to any new developments and technologies. Apple and Linux have always been the first in class there.
If you want a well supported operating system on your old computer, install Windows on it. Don't rely on the work of enthousiasts that are just trying to build the best next thing.
Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#8> But, given that Linux is a community-supported operating system that does not need to make a profit,
Linux doesn't need money to make a living, software maintainers do.
> I see no valid reason for it not supporting every computer that can still be useful.
I assume the author is willing to pay all the people who are going to maintain all of those "computers that can still be useful" instead of demanding that they conjure spare time for that out of nowhere.
As much as I share the sentiment of keeping old hardware alive and useful, reality requires a question of "who's going to work on that".
Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#9I am finding NetBSD works better on old computers than Linux. The differences are not too great. They are basically all based on the same POSIX standards.
NetBSD has all sorts of neat ports. It would device be my go to *nix for “near-vintage” machines.
Re: Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers
#10I'm as opposed to throwing away machines as the author is, but I also recognise that anything with less than 1 GB of RAM is unusable in this day and age. Modern websites are simply too large to handle on such equipment, and most people do their work online.
Do you mean images and media, since these could be avoided/ mitigated? Or do you mean the browser itself won't work in a constrained environment?