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If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

muezza.ca

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Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#121

Post by zokier »

On PC side something like 2004-2005 vintage desktop wouldn't necessarily be all that impractical to use even today. I'm basing this on Anands "buyers guide" to get a feeling what the general lineup was like then: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1692/11

You got 64-bit CPU, SATA HDD, PCIe graphics with OpenGL 2, USB 2.0 connectors, and DVI flat panel display. Its something I'd expect you can just throw Debian Stable in and be perfectly usable with lightweight WM, or maybe even something like XFCE for full graphical desktop. Of course as others have mentioned, browser is the real problem, but 1GB might be enough to browse HN at least?

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#122

Post by NL807 »

primis wrote: post #72
horsawlarway wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It still makes sense to use a decade-old computer. I don't really think it does, at least not some of them. A lot of those older machines are just running really, really high idle power draw. Ex: Pentium 4/5, Core 2 Duo, Athlon64, etc. Running from 40 to 100 watts idle. For comparison, a new RPI will go as low as ~1-3 watt idle, tops out at ~5-7 watts under full load, and will generally have better performance char…

A decade ago was 2013, the pentium 4 is at least 13 years old now, but entered production 23 years ago. There's still a lot of utility to be had from a 10 year old machine. My daily driver laptop os a lenovo t420 which came out in 2011. Sure it can't play games but it'll do fine with youtube, programming, etc. My server box is also a 2012 era machine, it's a 3770k build. It's perfectly fine for what I use it for. Yea…

> it's a 3770k build

I have an i7 3770 and it's still ok for gaming even.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#123

Post by andai »

charcircuit wrote: post #120
andai wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if software running slowly on your own computer automatically made you optimize it I recently changed 1 byte in Chrome.dll and decreased the lag for copying large images by a factor of 2-3. (The UI freezes for 5-10 seconds. Turns out it's re-encoding a 2MB JPG into a 20MB PNG for the clipboard, at compression level 6 no less!) I put up with it for years thinking there was nothing I could do, but one day I decided to…

For those curious. https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ui/... An improvement would be to replace EncodeBGRASkBitmap with FastEncodeBGRASkBitmap so that it uses the fastest zlib level instead of the default (6). This is what the Linux X11 (ozone) implementation uses. This would be an easy fix to upstream if someone wants to do it.

Yeah, like you said they literally already wrote the code that does that, not sure why they didn't use it. Setting compression to 0 is still 2 full seconds of lag for me (down from 8s), so there's still a lot of overhead. There are faster png implementations but I think re-encoding a 2MB JPEG into a 20MB PNG (to be re-encoded back to JPG by whatever program you paste it into) is kind of missing the mark.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#124

Post by andai »

anthk wrote: post #75
andai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been a while, but I had a better time with w3m. I think it was the only textmode browser I tried that preserved the nesting of comments on HN. Context: I was on a 3kbps connection and basically everything was unusable, so I ran a textmode browser on a VPS over Mosh.

I did that, literally the same, but with lynx/links instead of w3m over a pubnix with mosh. Also, gopher sites thru gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://magical.fish. I could even play some streaming radio with OPUS @16KBPS from http://dir.xiph.org once I set mplayer to cache the 90% of the stream.

Yeah, I set up my own Opus mirror of Chilledcow's Lofi station ;) Necessity is the mother of reading manpages!

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#125

Post by 0xDEF »

rakoo wrote: post #30
pdimitar wrote: post #6

The problem with arguments like these is to me two-fold: 1. Physical space. Most of the older tech takes too much space. I don't live in a mansion and I have no dedicated rooms just for big bulky computers. 2. Power consumption, heat, noise. I would love to be less consumerist and use stuff from 15 years ago and stop feeding greedy corporations but... the old stuff consumes 90 to 200 watts, heats up easily and notice…

In digital, pollution happens during construction way more than usage. It still makes sense to use a decade-old computer. The second-hand market is filled with material that was built at same point; you having access to your nice second hand laptop is due to newer laptops being built all the time. It is still sending a signal upstream that such a computer can be sold. I do agree that buying second hand is much better…

Manufacturing pollution is a localized problem. Using energy inefficient machines lead to more energy consumption and CO2 emissions that are threatening global climate.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#126

Post by harel »

johnklos wrote: post #33

There are lots of people in the comments here who appear to not get it. This isn't about replacing a contemporary computer with something old. It's about the usability of a decent OS on very modest hardware. One of the systems on which I run NetBSD is a 33 MHz m68030 Mac LC III+ ( http://elsie.zia.io - it's hosting a site about an LC II, which I'm still working on). It's quite useful to see how assumptions people mak…

Absolutely this. I'll add that there is a certain kind of joy (to me at least) to see an old machine spring back to life and become useful again.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#128

Post by ironmagma »

drpixie wrote: post #110
abricot wrote: post #4

If you are happy not surfing most of the Web, any computer is good enough. It's usually browsers and web pages that brings these older PCs down.

Presumably the result of Google making Chromium more and more like a whole OS (and everyone else following along). Is it ridiculous to give a browser such fine-grained access to your computer? If we were actually designing web standards for usability (instead of for maximising attention) our browsers would look al= lot more like Web 1.0 and nothing like Web 3.0!

Unaffiliated, but I hope Ladybird takes off as a new contender for a modern browser. It seems to have something resembling critical mass.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#129

Post by hochmartinez »

anthk wrote: post #78
amelius wrote: post #3

> While I fully acknowledge there's a lot you can't do on a system like this (Docker, anything GPU related) it's still able to do a lot of productive work without feeling like a total dog to use. This, of course, is becoming less and less true.

How so? Celeron, 2GB of RAM, ~4GB with compressed ZRAM. Libreoffice works, most stuff works with GL 2.1, even 720p video with MPV. LibreOffice, Ted, Abiword, GNUMeric... For the rest, UBlock Origin it's your friend and git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters to cut in half the realistical Chromium requeriments.

... Add Linux with a 6.1 kernel with MGLRU, enable ext4 fast_commit, stop unnecessary services.

Switch Chrome by Brave. Add a tab suspender. If you have 4GB or more, set the browser cache to RAM (a tmpfs directory).

You'll be surprised of how speedy and usable is your old Celeron computer.

And this CPU is very power efficient, so no heat and no fan. Silence.

My 2016 Lenovo laptop was almost unusable with windows 10 and its myriad of processes hogging the CPU.

Manjaro Linux brought this little laptop to life and now it's my daily driver, more than enough for my needs (browsing, coding).

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#130

Post by toyg »

verytrivial wrote: post #101

I love the idea of OpenBSD but have only had a couple of sad reintroductions over the years and never spent the time apparently required to "get it just right" before needing to get something else done. It feels like a base install leaves you in several hours of configuration debt, and I apparently don't have the concentration span to dig my way out to somewhere interesting and not just half way back to productive on…

I have a love-hate relationship with OpenBSD but I don't feel this "configuration debt". The whole point of it is that you don't enable stuff you don't really need; and if you really need something, then you should make the effort to actually understand what it does and how to configure it.

For this same reason, it's simply a poor desktop OS. A modern UNIX-like desktop is a very complex system, with so many moving parts held together with hacks and duct tape. As OpenBSD effectively forces you to familiarise yourself with such duct tape solutions, it also forces you to do more work than you'd want - or to stick with environments that feel somewhat basic.

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