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

Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 113 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#11

Post by vegabook »

webwanderings wrote: post #3

With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.

2-4GB is not enough for you? And the brand spanking new 2016 Macbook Pros default to 8GB and 2-4 is not enough on an old computer? I routinely browse the web in a 2GB Linux VM with Firefox under Windows, with less than 1GB in use on htop. It's easy to run even Ubuntu with under 200MB of RAM usage if you forgo Unity, and 500 MB with it.

What hobbles the web on older hardware is not "2-4GB" but very slow processors (having to handle all that advertising Javascript, over-animated UIs, and bloated front-end frameworks).

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#12

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

webwanderings wrote: post #3

With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.

My main home computer is a 2 Go netbook with an Atom CPU. Not only I use it to browse the internet on a daily basis, but it was what I used to develop an award-winning, AI-powered content classification webapp.

I used to do it because I had no choice (alternatives are way too expensive than what I can afford).

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#13

Post by zokula »

webwanderings wrote: post #6
onesun wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of Chromebooks are still shipping with 2GB of RAM and they do a perfectly sufficient job of running the "Internet" for most everyday users. I would argue your lower limit of a reasonable Internet browsing experience is higher than average because of your technical background. 512MB would be limiting for sure, but a machine with 2GB of RAM running a Linux desktop, especially with an SSD if possible, would make a…

Well, I'd argue that Internet browsing with 2GB is only suitable for reading news and email. This then is a common denominator for layman user, who then wouldn't be using Linux or Pi to begin with. However, this thread is not about Chromebook (and I agree with you there about Chromebook - my wife uses it for email/youtube browsing, and it works perfectly fine). There's a big difference between Chromebook and Linux/Pi…

One can watch youtube, play browser games and browse full web sites, and watch h.264 movies with a system that has under 1GB of ram.

And your second point is almost moot since Chromebooks run on top of Gentoo Linux of all things.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#14

Post by VLM »

webwanderings wrote: post #3

With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.

How many people buy Pi to browse the web? The purpose of the project seems to be

1) Find something to do with a Pi

2) Instead of buying a Pi, run Pi infrastructure software on an old laptop instead

If browsing doesn't work on an old laptop (although it does, but for the sake of argument...) then the bug is observed after step #2 but the actual failure location was in step #1, when "I wanna browse the web" somehow led to using a Pi to do it.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#15

Post by userbinator »

webwanderings wrote: post #3

With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.

512MB is certainly not going to be sufficient for huge web apps and the like, but is plenty for "real oldschool-style web pages" containing mostly text and images.

As I write this my system is consuming 440MB of 4GB, and I have many other (mainly source code) files open which I'm also working on.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#17

Post by sandworm101 »

VLM wrote: post #14
webwanderings wrote: post #3

With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.

How many people buy Pi to browse the web? The purpose of the project seems to be 1) Find something to do with a Pi 2) Instead of buying a Pi, run Pi infrastructure software on an old laptop instead If browsing doesn't work on an old laptop (although it does, but for the sake of argument...) then the bug is observed after step #2 but the actual failure location was in step #1, when "I wanna browse the web" somehow led…

Old laptops and pis arent exactly interchangable. There are som significant power, input/output, and form factor differences.

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#18

Post by JayHost »

crispytx wrote: post #16

Puppy Linux has already been breathing new new life into old PCs. I have an IBM ThinkPad just like the one featured in the article running Puppy Linux.

Headlines like these are always mind bogglin.

I always wished the Puppy project would allow better browsing on the raspberry pi.

I really dislike the new Raspberry pi toolbar / desktop

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#19

Post by carussell »

ImAGirl wrote: post #10

It's wonderful how the RaspberryPi foundation achieved everything the OLPC initiative--backed by huge names--tried and failed to do.

Everything OLPC set out to do?

OLPC was meant to come with a display and a keyboard baked in, all in a (fully open) package that you could chuck across the room; a "View Source" button to let you inspect and edit the code to all your apps; UI making it easy to set up ad hoc networks to share/collaborate with anyone around you; and to put this all into the hands of children across the world, not just first world schoolchildren and the offspring of upper-middle class tinkerers.

These just the main points from OLPC's value proposition—we're not even delving into obscure or nuanced stuff yet. How does RaspberryPi's success measure at any one of these things, let alone all of them?

Re: Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs

#20

Post by johansch »

ImAGirl wrote: post #10

It's wonderful how the RaspberryPi foundation achieved everything the OLPC initiative--backed by huge names--tried and failed to do.

The details around the commercial relationship between Qualcomm and the Raspberry Pi foundation is lacking quite a bit in transparency in my mind.

I guess that one of my suspicions here is that some people are making lots of money on something that is billed and marketed as a selfless charity.

(https://www.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundatio... is not nearly detailed enough.)

OLPC is a whole other kind of (a very academic kind of) disaster.

Post reply on HN