>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
or better yet, install NetBSD. That system will run on anything that old :)
Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
81–90 of 135 posts
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#82With the crazy hardware prices. It's time to go lean. Embrace lean software and learn to do with less or pay the price with your hard earned $$$.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#83It is astonishing to me just how bad end user software has gotten over the past twenty years. It's just goofballs. It's not like that point was when software started requiring more resources, the "What Andy giveth Bill taketh" aphorism was coined in the 90s after all. Software gets complicated over time. Every bug fix or added input validation or whatever adds code. That's fine and appropriate. Convenience and integrity add code/complexity. That's not what I find so bothersome.
I find 2006 an interesting horizon. It was then that the average home computer massively jumped in processing power compared to the software running on it. For the vast majority of users the computer spent more idle time waiting for input than users waited for output. Of course for some users there's never enough power but for most all of their tasks were effectively instant. Even heavyweight (for the time) stacks like Java ran incredibly well. He'll even Emacs could run well!
Then the curve seemed to invert. Hardware kept getting more capable with even faster CPUs, more cores (on common consumer machines, and more RAM. As the article points out a "lightweight" Linux DE with native apps really flies on such hardware.
But more development seemed to move to the web. More JavaScript required more powerful JS engines and those are up more and more memory. More shit loaded into the DOM means more and more objects on the heap with more pointer chasing.
Modern stacks are really only fast because modern computers brute force their way through them. A simple CRUD type task that fly as a VB or Delphi (neither stack performance kings) app on Windows 2000 now requires a 2GHz dual core CPU with 4GB of RAM as a baseline thanks to it now being a web app.
Using a twenty old machine with native applications and the CLI feels to me like a super computer compared to the computers I first used (Apple IIs). A Core 2 Duo is a stupidly powerful CPU for most tasks. If you can get by with a command line workflow even a Core 2 Duo is crazy fast.
/soapbox
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#84why not just take stock Arch Linux?
I feel it as minimal at it can, Am I wrong?
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#85For older hardware: Void Linux, Xubuntu or maybe Linux Mint Xfce. If you want something up to date that needs to be online. AntiX and Puppy Linux are a bit too rough, in my opinion. I'd rather leave the machine with some fully updated old Windows version designed for that hardware, offline. Works very well for retro gaming, ripping CDs and stuff like that.
The AI that wrote this article doesn't have enough nuance to understand the rough edges of antiX.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#86why not just take stock Arch Linux? I feel it as minimal at it can, Am I wrong?
The prompt for this article probably had a Ubuntu focus.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#87You don't even have to go that old. There are so many companies that upgrade tiny pc's its created a whole self hosting community with the tiny lenovo, hp and dell unit's. It's not only Windows that can be replaced with old hardware but also many online services with proxmox for cloud/nas/dns/vpn/multimedia etc. Of course these are not 2GB systems but you can do some pretty cool things with 8 and 9 year old systems t…
Those old tiny/micro PCs make for wonderful TV steaming boxes, and easily replace Fire TV sticks, AppleTV boxes, Rokus and other similar proprietary garbage. They are also great for retro gaming.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have it backwards. When using zram, there is no "evicted to swap"; zram is the swap. Even if you activated zram and disk-backed swap, I'm pretty sure they just get used in parallel, not through some sort of fallback. It was my understanding that zswap does decompress pages before writing them to disk. Annoyingly, this doesn't seem to be spelled out either way in https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admi…
Yup, you are correct about decompressing before hitting disk. > Even if you activated zram and disk-backed swap, I'm pretty sure they just get used in parallel, not through some sort of fallback. You can tweak priorities such that zram ends up being the preferred location for swaps. However, since it looks like just another block device, what happens is it simply gets filled up with the first swap entries and those i…
Okay, that's why we're partially talking past each other: It didn't occur to me that someone would swap to zram and something else. Yes, if disk-backed swap is in play, then zswap is the best option.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#89I like running Linux on older Dell Optiplex systems that you can buy off of Ebay. They usually come with 8GB ram, 256 or 512 SSD and usually 4 to 6 cores (maybe 8). All of the ones I bought use Intel CPUs.
They run Debian or Ubuntu great although I usually run them headless and just SSH into them. One experiment I did was with Talos / K8s with about 3 of these and it worked great.
Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a pathetic world.. and sad.. I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB.. If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling, I really get shivers... WTF?! How is that even possible? Bloat is astronomical and yet.. Most people just does NOT care...
> I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB.. In what context? >If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling Modern Gnome and KDE distros with batteries included also idea at around 2GB RAM which is a useless metric anyway as Windows 11 also preloads frequently used takes and apps on boot.
I recently installed Arch Linux on a fairly old (but not ancient) Intel T2 Mac, with the GNOME DE, and it uses less than 1.5GB of RAM. I went for the standard gnome package which as far as I can tell is "batteries included."
That leaves about 6.5GB for programs, which I think is acceptable.