Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

muezza.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 357 posts

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

#181

Post by slondr »

nextos wrote: post #165
harel wrote: post #127

You're only using 61 MB of your 512 MB RAM. Megabyte. I love it. Megabyte. I distinctly remember the happiness of attaching a 512KB RAM expansion card to my Amiga, bringing total RAM to 1MB. You have 512 of those!

Any Linux distribution that can be configured to be minimal (e.g. NixOS, Arch Linux, etc.) can boot a mainstream stack (systemd + pulseaudio + Xorg + tiling window manager) in less than 300 MB RAM. It's a great experience. I use an old NUC (i5-4250U) as a daily driver and it's almost as fast as a new machine for regular tasks, it feels like the OP's.

I always get whiplash seeing people mention hardware newer than the stuff in my server rack, which I would consider to be high-performance, and call it "old" and describe daily driving it as if it's a nearly unbelievable phenomenon

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

#182

Post by pdimitar »

userbinator wrote: post #178
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…

The old stuff is far more open and documented, which is very important from a freedom perspective. Repairability is really low for anything even slightly recent. I'm not sure which Celeron J you're referring to, but I know some models were affected by the infamous LPC clock bug --- which might explain why there seems to be a surplus of machines with those CPUs available for amazingly low prices. I like computers the…

It's 100% a fact that 1 million of us can't make the difference that 5-10 plants will make if they modernize their processes and are less toxic to the environment. Facts are facts.

But I also don't like paying a lot for electricity. :)

Virtue signalling is dumb and I hate it. In this case I happen to also have a personal interest.

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

#183

Post by fsckboy »

amatecha wrote: post #86
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.

We do have basically latest Firefox on OpenBSD. But yeah, to be fair, I have to restart Firefox frequently on my X230's running OpenBSD. It either just stops rendering altogether (literally even application UI fails to render) or eats up so much memory and CPU the cooling fan is just always running at a kinda high level. Otherwise, it's super solid and a great OS for older machines IMO.

> restart Firefox frequently on my X230's running OpenBSD

what wildly multithreaded memory hogs are you running? I love my x230s, and I have dozens and dozens of windows open all the time. probably I benefit a good bit from running ublock Origin and uMatrix, but I have gigabytes of RAM free. I don't think running a newer machine would give me any benefits at all.

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

#184

Post by Jaywalker9988 »

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…

Its always odd to hear people complain about noise or power consumption to me.. It's just never a thought that even crosses my mind.. much less the co2 emissions haha. My concerns are generally about my compile times on older hardware and nothing else.

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

#185

Post by Gigachad »

winter_blue wrote: post #179
userbinator wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or apps that have no business being webapps, but somehow are. When a chat and video/audio call client take 4GB all by itself...

It's bloat caused by stuff like Electron, and people choosing to write desktop apps in HTML + JavaScript/TypeScript + some framework. If people even used a framework like Qt (a really mature and well-maintained desktop framework the favored framework of KDE Plasma, etc.), their memory usage would be so much lower. (I'm not counting the memory used by Qt's shared .so / dynamic library files.)

Is virtually every single company and developer wrong? Or is Qt actually not that good, forcing people to use Electron despite it's resource usage?

I find it far easier to believe that Qt and GTK have fallen behind rather than the whole world is under a grand delusion and didn't know Qt exists.

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

#186

Post by ndesaulniers »

goosedragons wrote: post #42
AprilArcus wrote: post #2

Would love know more about the "dire state" of ppc32 linux

No big distro supports it and I can only think of one that still does (Adelie). Modern web browsers won't easily compile for it, probably other packages. And soon support for GPUs like the ATI Rage commonly used in 1998-2001ish era Macs will be removed from the kernel.

We still do ppc32 kernel build+boot tests in CI. Wonder if we should consider spinning those down...

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

#187

Post by Gigachad »

Jaywalker9988 wrote: post #184
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…

Its always odd to hear people complain about noise or power consumption to me.. It's just never a thought that even crosses my mind.. much less the co2 emissions haha. My concerns are generally about my compile times on older hardware and nothing else.

It's not the end of the world but I hated the 2019 Intel Macbook I had at a previous job. The thing would be roasting hot, fans blasting constantly if you had docker open. Now I run docker and a million other things on my 2021 Macbook in total silence and a cold laptop.

Feels like we jumped 10 years forward in a single iteration.

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

#188

Post by Gigachad »

jack_pp wrote: post #174
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…

You don't need old as in 20 year old. just cheap / second hand fanless computers like 2nd or 3rd gen NUCs, raspberry Pi's etc

Is anyone actually using the pi as a desktop? Feels like most people need a laptop for portability, which is already many times more powerful than the pi, and then if you do have a non portable desktop, it's for gaming.

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

#189

Post by serf »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #180

This week I've been "rejuvenating" my 11 year old i7 2600k desktop. I built a zen 3 based computer a couple years ago, purely as a luxury, after spending 5 days in the hospital ICU. The i7 was chugging along just fine doing whatever I needed it to do, and it seemed a waste to just forget about it. I fully disassembled it and cleaned out the dust. I spent an evening lapping the CPU and heat sink down to 2000 grit. I p…

The worst part isn't that the old hardware isn't worthwhile; it's that it has to be hobbled so much in order to be secure on todays' net.

Things like Spectre created a lot of additional obsolescence.

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

#190

Post by NovaPenguin »

wsc981 wrote: post #99
pdimitar wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's not a super clear win. But I was talking about the old desktop or all-in-one machines. They still draw a bit more but you're also right that the amortized cost blurs things. But since I plan on using the refurbished modern machines that I got, for years, maybe the equation will be in my favor... eventually. :)

I wonder if the same is true for a -say- G3 based laptop or desktop. Apple’s laptops would often be usable much longer on batteries compared to its Wintel counterparts.

It is an interesting question. Apple hyper-optimized the OS for PPC when it was still relevant. Even modern PPC OS's with a good 20 years of additional compiler optimizations don't run those things anywhere near as well.
Post reply on HN