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  • The post is missing a section about video cards.

    My old laptop from 2006 has an ATI x1600. I remember that I lost v sync with kernels past 3.something so I had to put the kernel on hold while the other packages updated around it. That was around 2012. Maybe the issue is fixed by now but old graphic cards can make an old PC run only as a headless server. It's been years since I booted it.

    by pmontra
  • I have one Nvdia system where it's locked to their drivers in BIOS meaning I can't use AMD. Now Ubuntu has dropped support for old GeForce it's essentially a brick, thanks Nvidia and Canonical.
    by type0
  • Gallium will support r300 Radeon cards perfectly fine. If any I have this for some MESA and Intel video cards at ~/.drirc.

    Adapt it for your radeon driver. The device driver might be "ati", "radeon" or "radeonsi".

        <driconf>
         <device driver="i915">
         <application name="Default">
         <option name="stub_occlusion_query" value="true" />
         <option name="fragment_shader" value="true" />
         </application>
         </device>
    </driconf>
    by anthk
  • Don't get your OS recommendations from an LLM-generated article.
    by applfanboysbgon
  • >"browser.cache.disk.enable: Set to false. This disables the disk cache, which is unnecessary if you have an SSD (RAM cache is fast enough) and actively harmful on old hard drives (constant small writes degrade performance)."

    This paragraph especially feels LLM generated. It's nonsense (a fast disk makes disk cache more effective), with a "not even wrong" explanation (speed of RAM is unrelated to speed of disk). It's the kind of error you often see from LLMs, where you have the right words but no solid world model behind them. Of course, I can't actually prove it's LLM writing, and if it is then it appears to be edited by a human, but I don't recall ever seeing this kind of error from a known human writer.

    by mrob
  • The overall sentiment expressing the growing gap between software needs and hardware capabilities is sound. This is where FOSS projects shine who put deep thought into providing the same features modern users need into an OS that can intelligently utilize older computing resources. I've been in the industry since the Nineties and it still amazes me how many companies invest so little into backward-compatibility and performance during their OS and application design process.

    I've had my Panasonic Toughbook (CF31-5) for almost 10 years and while it's a dinosaur to some, it's a major upgrade from what I had before in terms of portable computing. Its max memory is 16 GiB DDR3 SDRAM on an Intel Core i5-5300U. When I first bought it I tried Debian and Ubuntu, but even back then those ran slow. I installed Xubuntu and have run that ever since with no performance issues whatsoever.

    Because I primarily use Emacs and TeX tools, writing Elisp and LaTeX, the system is more than enough for me. I've not played graphics-heavy games, run GPU-intensive UI or done any heavy data plotting. However, one benchmark I do have: I am able use the test automation framework required for my day job with ease. I run that software on Xubuntu because on my work-provided systems (Windows 11 and macOS Tahoe) the application crawls and is practically unusable.

    by christianbryant
  • Anyone 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.

    by srean
  • I 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.
    by NoboruWataya
  • See my comment above.
    by ValdikSS
  • 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...
    by Borg3
  • My first Linux PC was a 386DX-40 with 20 MB RAM and about 80 MB of HDD space.

    I was able to run X Windows, Emacs, and gcc for university CS work. I had to use 8 bit psuedocolor graphics to have a decent sized desktop like 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (on a nice CRT).

    But, I put it into a swapping frenzy by opening one JPEG that I had downloaded from an academic website. It was a high-resolution scan of some old manuscript, but probably lower pixel count than a typical smartphone photo from this decade.

    Doing normal work also involved frequent swapping delays as you launched new programs and evicted old ones.

    by saltcured
  • It is wild how bad things have gotten. I have a small Linux tablet with 8GB of RAM that I only really use for browsing. Even that runs out of RAM quickly when I open more than 20 tabs (depends on the sites of course). And more than 3 Electron apps pretty much always means game over.

    15 years ago 8 gigabytes of RAM were "wow what am I going to do with all this space" territory.

    by lutoma
  • For 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.

    by mgrunwald_
  • The AI that wrote this article doesn't have enough nuance to understand the rough edges of antiX.
    by margalabargala
  • And 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#post1268100
    by ValdikSS
  • 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.
    by mpol
  • You 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 that are literally decommissioned because they are too old. Although a friend of mine who works for a MSP gave me a Lenovo m710q tiny a month ago and its made a pretty good Debian Desktop for my workbench in the garage. I lucked out there because even these tiny's are now going up in price. People have caught on.
    by alaudet
  • I work at an ewaste recycling company. Since I started working there over a year ago, over half the micro/tiny desktops I've seen come in are 7th gen i5 at least. In fact, I was using a Dell Optiplex 7050 Micro until about a month ago.
    by theandrewbailey
  • 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.
    by drnick1
  • I've purchased a few HP and Dell slim desktops (typically 2nd or 3rd generation i3s) on Newegg, from refurbished resellers. During the pandemic, they were $50-70 shipped and included 4GB of RAM. They support PCI-express in low profile, so I could plug in a monitor with 4k output using just displayport and a Radeon 7470 or an R5 R240. You could even get an i5 for not much more. I even had a couple work from home companies offering to ship the same size machine, Nowadays they are more likely to send a laptop and possibly a docking station, so it's a lot more portable (although I prefer to do without those too).
    by initramfs
  • It 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

    by giantrobot
  • 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)

    by initramfs
  • How's Alpine? Most of the containers seem to pick Alpine as the basis OS.
    by ww520
  • > and it had issues crashing on browsers under even a couple tabs.

    Surely this has way more to do with the browser (and the website!) than the OS, nowadays.

    by zahlman
  • It's cool to see your interest in running Linux on highly constrained systems. I might check out eXe Linux, since I spent a bit of time messing with Linux on my Cr-48 Chromebook, which has an Atom N455.

    Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?

    Here's my own blog post covering Arch Linux on the Cr-48: https://dansalva.to/resurrecting-a-prototype-chromebook-with...

    Note that since my writing of that post, i915 graphics support in Wayland has been fixed, so it's now viable to run a Wayland DE if desired.

    by dansalvato
  • I run vanilla Arch with niri (Wayland), Waybar and a few other tools to create a desktop environment. I didn't do any special kernel or app specific tweaks for performance.

    The machine boots using 1.1 GB of memory and total disk space after installing a bunch of apps is ~10 GB. Browser, Docker, video editor, image editor, LibreOffice, OBS, VMs, a ton of CLI tools and everything you'd expect to have a fully working and usable system is there.

    It's a wonderful environment on 2014 era hardware. Granted I have 16 GB of memory but it would be fine with 8 GB even when running non-trivial Docker based projects and doing 1080p video editing.

    Even Silksong runs at 60 FPS with a GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB) GPU. Although I splurged on a used AMD RX 480 (8 GB) to get more things to run nicely in parallel. Wayland is very picky with limited GPU VRAM, especially with NVIDIA cards.

    I also run the same set up on a more modern laptop with way better hardware but things aren't much faster unless I'm very CPU bound.

    Everything to get the system up and running in 1 command and 10-15 minutes is here: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice

    by nickjj
  • The 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?
    by AnthonyMouse
  • > 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10

    Where would I find it sold?

    > and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile

    Hey, I'm using one to write this :(

    by zahlman
  • With laptops of this era you only have two sodimm slots and DDR2 4GB RAM modules were quite expensive when they were new. So even still today they are more expensive than you would think. I sold mine for $25/each a few weeks ago.

    Also some laptops of this era didn't support more than 4-6GB of RAM in the firmware. I know there are several models of early intel macbooks that you can physically install 8GB of RAM but they will not recognize it.

    On the other hand, I have a 2010 iMac with all 4 DDR3 sodimm slots full giving it 32GB of RAM. It was a "just for fun" project before the AI prices. Those era iMacs are fully upgradeable (CPU, RAM, and GPU). Swapped in an i7 CPU, AMD m4000 GPU, and an SSD. Runs linux mint great.

    by windowsrookie
  • There are a lot of old Chromebooks with only 2GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard. Other than that, they're surprisingly capable machines after you flash them with MrChromebox firmware.
    by johnvaluk