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Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

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Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#51

Post by windowsrookie »

pansa2 wrote: post #31

What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler. Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?

They would work but I'm not sure it's worth it. The 11" Air had a pretty terrible screen, and the models with 8GB of RAM are more expensive than I think they are worth. Plus Macbooks of this era are going to need a battery replacement, so your going to have to invest $70-100 on top of the price of buying the Macbook. You're likely going to be $200-300 invested into a 10 year old macbook.

Also keep in mind the 11" MacBook air wasn't that small. The Macbook neo with a 13" screen has almost the same dimensions.

For $300-400 you can buy a decent brand new chromebook, and running linux is officially supported on them. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

The chuwi minibook is also an option, but I don't know how well linux is supported.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#52

Post by windowsrookie »

s3arch wrote: post #2

>The honest assessment: If the machine cannot run a lightweight Linux desktop at a usable speed after you have applied the optimizations in this guide, it is time to recycle it responsibly. Most municipalities have e-waste collection programs. Do not throw it in the trash. The components contain recyclable metals and toxic materials that need proper handling. This is the whole point.Linux helps in that judgement whet…

I also agree. I'd say we're at the last few years of Core 2 Duo machines being usable. Anything before them is just not worth keeping around. Not only are earlier machines slow, but are going to be pretty energy inefficient. Buying a newer system might actually save you money when you factor electricity costs.

For example, a 2009-2012 era Mac Pro draws more power in sleep than a modern Mac mini/macbook Air draws under full load.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#55

Post by Random09 »

> They are slow because Windows got heavier while the hardware stayed the same.

That is not true. They are slow, because ALL software got better and more advanced and that is not only the operating system. It always makes me mad when people say that macOS is so optimized you can do more than on windows.

No. Old hardware not having a hardware decoder for modern youtube videos won't play them.

Modern webpages full of interactive realtime features won't fit in the RAM or will be bottlecked by a cpu. Yes, the modern linux will run, but are you going to do anything more than opening a notepad or old software? No. You are not going to use modern web apps or software on it.

Is it okay? Yes. Optimizing for old hardware is EXPENSIVE. Just move on.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#56

Post by 2b3a51 »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #53
type0 wrote: post #19

I would advise against using Lubuntu in favour of MX Linux or AntiX for older systems.

Yes, I was surprised that MX didn't get a mention. It's great on anything with 2GB or more.

Another possibility is Slackware 15.0 which is the stable release that gets updates. Available in 32 and 64 bit, runs a 5.15 series kernel (antiX 26 32bit uses a 5.10.x kernel). I have an install on an ancient Thinkpad T42 with 1Gb ram, a single centrino chipset CPU, 40Gb hard drive and radeon graphics. Chugs along nicely with Abiword, Gnumeric and Dillo. Firefox will load but is deeply unhappy.

(I install everything except the KDE and XAP package sets, and then install selected packages from XAP as I need them e.g. GIMP, xpdf and so on)

MX has more recent packages for some things though, Slackware 15 is getting mature.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#57

Post by jonstewart »

I’ve got a 15 year old workstation that I’m breathing new life into, but fortunately starting from a higher baseline. 24GB of RAM is going to 96GB, and it turns out it should be able to use an NVMe drive, so have a card and an M2 drive on the way. The annoying thing is that the GTX 460 is no longer supported by the Nvidia driver so I’m back to nouveau. That might get replaced with something more modern. I had an old Mint installed and decided to blow it away with stock Debian, and Claude’s setting up nix VMs for itself to run in. It has been crazy how $4k in 2011 for an SR-2 system has yielded a long productive life for this box.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#58

Post by arprocter »

Nice to see BunsenLabs getting some love - smooth way into a GUI Debian

I prefer Boron over the more recent Carbon due to some of the panel changes (although presumably this is all configurable somewhere)

https://ddl.bunsenlabs.org/ddl/

Boron also probably requires this fix:

https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?pid=144667

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#59

Post by initramfs »

Thanks for this link!

"antiX is my top pick for truly constrained hardware. It runs on systemd-free Debian Stable, uses around 256MB at idle, and includes a full desktop experience. The trade-off is a less polished interface compared to Ubuntu-based options. If you need something even lighter, Puppy Linux runs entirely in RAM and can resurrect machines that most distros would reject. The learning curve is steeper, but the performance is unmatched."

I would actually recommend Bodhi Linux for under 2GB. https://www.bodhilinux.com/ I installed AntiX on a 2GB Chromebook, and it had issues crashing on browsers under even a couple tabs. It might have just been the laptop I bought from Goodwill, or the fact that I disabled swap, because it was an old 16GB soldered SSD/NAND drive that I wanted to avoid heavily writing swap space to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhozuNv-J7Q

Bodhi is more featured with a more conventional package manager than Puppy, and while I like booting from RAM, it's learning curve is a little steeper and less maintained than Bodhi, which is getting a new release soon: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodhilinux/comments/1qqrfyj/is_bodh...

I did a video with Bodhi on Virtual box with 1GB since I didn't have the Chromebook with me at the time, but it idles around 350MB (possibly before Chromium running): https://youtu.be/61xI-g--ozs?si=y7ukxyEGSj_kNPF7

For additional package manager support, a nice UI (Enlightenment) and compatibility, it's far more preferrable than 250MB ideling on AntiX with less support.

For Atom N450 series, I recommend eXe Linux: https://exegnulinux.net/ I have a video of that too.

I hadn't heard of BunsenLabs, but I will definitely check it out (Note: Atom N450 chips support 64 bit, even on single core, so they might work great on those machines)

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