If you think Linux is a good candidate for older hardware (which it is) wait until you try a BSD.
Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
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Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#22And not a word about MGLRU and its settings. It has the biggest impact on performance on lower-end PCs, especially with low amount of RAM and slow HDD.
Here's a post from "le9" patch user which was created by ChromeOS developers much before MGLRU, but exploits the similar idea: keeping the essential file cache in RAM for as long as possible. It's usually night and day on low-end machines.
- https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1267300-le9-strives-to-make-linux-very-usable-on-systems-with-small-amounts-of-ram?p=1267789#post1267789
- https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1267300-le9-strives-to-make-linux-very-usable-on-systems-with-small-amounts-of-ram?p=1268100#post1268100Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#23And not a word about MGLRU and its settings. It has the biggest impact on performance on lower-end PCs, especially with low amount of RAM and slow HDD. Here's a post from "le9" patch user which was created by ChromeOS developers much before MGLRU, but exploits the similar idea: keeping the essential file cache in RAM for as long as possible. It's usually night and day on low-end machines. - https://www.phoronix.com/f…
I had never heard of it, but checking it, I see MGLRU is enabled by default on my kernel (Mageia 10 with 6.18.xx). Are there distros where this is not enabled? Especially the ones mentioned in the blogpost? In that case it would need a recompile of the kernel, right? Or send in a bugreport to the distro.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#24Anyone remembers Ross technologies ?
When I was a student mucking around the trashed corner of a retired hardware room, I found a very dusty box that looked promising. It was a Ross hyperstation.
I was able to install Arch Linux and Debian on it. But I think it had some corrupt RAM and would crash after a few days if lucky or hours if not. That was a pity. This was the first system where I could see 4 cpus and had got pretty excited. This was a time when there were rumours of Intel dual cores going around. I was planning to run it as our NFS file server.
I was able to bootstrap GCC on it too, after a few tries.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And you can go even smaller with TinyCore Linux or the xwoaf-rebuil Sure, but in this time and age, do they really have to settle for such extreme 90s looks as defaults? I mean, Windows XP Media Center Edition can surely be considered as "lightweight" today and it featured the gorgeous Royale theme back in 2005.
Yeah, this is what always surprises me with modern software targeted towards low-specced computers. Windows XP run fine in 256MB ram computers yet it could be altered to make it look fantastic, with the Royale or Royale Noir themes. I guess even Linux back then could be made beautiful on similarly specced computers. Yet, AntiX or even LxQt is hideous despite consuming more resources!
I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of customization. I think partially it's down to the platform many use (many seek to theme mobile OSes), but the tools to do so has to be a large contribution. I'm not aware of anything like Stardock's Skin studio that exists outside windows, and from looking at their website it's now useless for anything past win10 1909. Having their art seen on widely used platforms (OS or applications) has to be a large draw to it as well.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#26Swap the HDD for an SSD first makes more difference than the distro choice.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#27And not a word about MGLRU and its settings. It has the biggest impact on performance on lower-end PCs, especially with low amount of RAM and slow HDD. Here's a post from "le9" patch user which was created by ChromeOS developers much before MGLRU, but exploits the similar idea: keeping the essential file cache in RAM for as long as possible. It's usually night and day on low-end machines. - https://www.phoronix.com/f…
I had never heard of it, but checking it, I see MGLRU is enabled by default on my kernel (Mageia 10 with 6.18.xx). Are there distros where this is not enabled? Especially the ones mentioned in the blogpost? In that case it would need a recompile of the kernel, right? Or send in a bugreport to the distro.
For HDD, it also needs to be tuned. In its default configuration, MGLRU 'just' manages multiple generations of working sets, but there's a min_ttl_ms tunable which tries hard to prevent file cache from being reclaimed, which is not enabled by default.
https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/multigen_lru.html#thr...
You'd want to set it to 300 or 500, or even 1000 for the HDDs. Around 100-200 for SSDs/EMMCs helps as well.
And for anonymous pages swapping, you'd want to do that on zram (compressed swap in RAM). It also make wonders. You don't want to touch the (old) disk for that.
Here's my old article (before MGLRU): https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/linux-for-old-pc-from-2007/en/
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#28The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#29It's interesting how on a server 2 GiB of RAM can get you quite far, however on a desktop that's pretty much the minimum feasible amount. It used to be the opposite: servers needed plenty of RAM and CPU compared to desktops
Personal servers never needed much in the way of resources. They only did, and still do, when you have a lot of simultaneous users. The database servers at Google or Microsoft don't have 2GiB of RAM. They plausibly have 2TiB.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#30I had a similar experience trying to use an old laptop with 2GB of RAM. I was surprised how much it struggled with basic tasks. I remember my first computer with 32MB of RAM. Obviously we live in a different world now but still, it's not like I was trying to do anything more ambitious than what I used to do on that PC.