Old computers and hardware are awesome for several reasons, specially if you really enjoy tinkering with computers!
- Linux/Un*x compatibility is usually pretty good. and those OSes are good for tinkering and producing new stuff. You can reuse your old boxes for staging servers and test beds.
- Old hardware forces you to learn more about how the hardware works and how to optimize your toolset. No, you don't need that insane number of daemons that run automatically if you install a vanilla distribution like Ubuntu. It is a nice stance against this ongoing trend of consumerism and disposable hardware.
We are wasting and rebuilding and tearing apart all our hardware each 2-3 years just for the sake of having that new instruction corrected in microcode or for having a conversational piece. it's bollocks.
We now have some insanely fast consumer processors which gives us the power to run and simulate real time graphics, audio synthesis, AR, etc.... but following the same trend, software is becoming more and more inefficient.
Some software solutions now require several hundred megs of binaries and local web servers and dlls and whatnot to solve the simplest of use cases. We have text editors and music players that now need a full Node.js server instance and a separate build of Chromium running just for doing shit that we used to get by with a tenth of ram and processing power. Thank god we still have some survivors like foobar2000, notepad++ and etc.
The effect of that inefficiency on us is that we get to do the same things we did 10 or 20 years ago (study, read, code, listen to music?), only using way more cycles for nothing.
Besides very few people running insanely complex simulations (which when scaled, are gonna be run on clusters or AWS anyway), most power users don't need that multicpu rig with 128 gigs of ram.
I have 2 old laptops now and one of those is a pretty usable 2010 Macbook with 3gigs of ram. It ran Mac OS X dog slow but now with Xubuntu, it's still pretty usable. And when XFCE starts becoming too bloaty, this box is gonna allow me to study tiling window managers and more lightweight customizable distros like Arch. The net effect is me studying more, which is always a win.
It's really shocking how much Linux Desktop has let itself go over the years. I remember when you could recommend someone install Linux on an old laptop to get it responsive again, but nowadays that advice isn't true anymore.
I recommend people to grab Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 from Archive[0] and try it in 86box[1] on an emulated Pentium 166MHz with 32MB of RAM and 2GB (or so) HDD. Do an installation that includes everything. Note that you only need the first CD (the one named "OpenLinux 2.3 CD.iso"), the rest are source code packages and some commercial stuff (that most people probably never saw, but the first CD was distributed via magazines).
This single 650MB CD IMO it is one of the most complete distributions in terms of what it includes and you can do with it. It includes a complete desktop environment (KDE 1), development tools (with an IDE), graphics editors, productivity tools, typesetting tools (TeX, LaTeX, Groff), databases, clients for mail, irc, web, etc, media players, a bunch of games and - most importantly - documentation for pretty much everything accessible right away from the panel at the bottom (...although ironically while there is also a "getting started with linux" document that describes the basics, for some reason it is not linked and not even compiled... you need to already know the console and docbook tools to compile it and read it :-P).
And on that machine is still very fast and usable. I tried it at some point a while ago and after playing with it for a while i started reading some of the included stuff and after a while i forgot i was in an emulated environment since everything was responsive. And this is, btw, exactly how i remembered it - this distribution was the first Linux distribution i ever used on my PC in 1999 (which was a 200MHz Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM).
(as a sidenote, yes this is the same Caldera that renamed themselves to SCO and made the infamous lawsuites, but this distro was made before that time)
Thanks for drowning the remainder of my Wednesday in nostalgia. Caldera OpenLinux was my first distro. I got its first CD bundled with some random book about Linux in 1999. The book came from a store that sold used books, so I was surprised to find the CD still nestled in there.
The book turned out to be garbage, but the CD changed my life. I still keep it at my desk 20 years later.
My first distro was Monkey Linux running on Caldera OpenDOS - circa 1994-5-ish. On a 386 laptop with 6 MB.
My first real distro was TurboLinux 2.0 - IIRC, that was on a Zenith 486 laptop with 8 MB.
Then I moved to RedHat 5.2 (don't recall the machine, some old desktop tower I think - maybe a P90 w/ 16 MB but I am not certain of that - might've been my AMD 586/133 box at the time).
A default install of Slackware from a 2.4Gb .iso will give you a similar environment that is reasonably functional on an X200 similar to the OAs. I actually use an X220 which is slightly more powerful but same ballpark.
Slackware is the closest i know of, but only because there isn't anything better. Beyond that it isn't really comparable since Slackware is just a collection of software thrown in together and it has a ton of redundant software, a large part of which is "bloated". The reason i mentioned to try out COL was that it provided an integrated system (it is probably the only time i used a Linux system where things felt like they were meant to work with each other - and kinda sad that this was on the first distro i ever used) with little redundant functionality (beyond practical matters - it has both KDE's web browser - not called Konqueror yet at the time - and Netscape since in 1999 the latter was pretty much needed for browsing the web on Linux) yet with a lot of functionality provided in a small footprint. The full install is a little above 900MB - in comparison Slackware's full (and only supported) install is a bit above 9GB (so it is more of a 10x inflation :-P) with a couple different desktop environments, a ton of window managers and a bunch of duplicated things.
But as i wrote, Slackware is the closest which is why i have an ISO of the latest DVD available on my external HDD to throw in a VM whenever i want to try something on Linux. Also (and this is only tangentially related) i like that it still provides "full" distribution media (in comparison Debian has become so overloaded with packages that to download installation media for archival/offline use you need to build them manually yourself and even then it is several blu-ray disks).
FWIW i do not think it is impossible to make something similar, but it would require a lot of work, especially on the desktop environment front.
I think the issue is just that the popular Linux Desktop environments have now moved to GPU acceleration to match the Windows and MacOS counterparts, simply because there's enough user demand for these features. However, lightweight desktop environments which don't rely on the GPU, like Xfce, MATE, and LXDE, absolutely still run on older hardware and can make it zip right along.
The unsolvable problem for older hardware unfortunately is the web browser; there's nothing the operating system can do to make websites less complex, and more and more sites are becoming ridiculously bloated with scripts and media which will lag badly even on modern PCs. Still, ignoring the web browser element, Linux as an OS is highly flexible, and it can be made to run well on just about anything. That's still one of its core strengths.
> However, lightweight desktop environments which don't rely on the GPU, like Xfce, MATE, and LXDE, absolutely still run on older hardware and can make it zip right along.
This is simply not true. It isn't just about the GPU, it's about everything accruing bloat.
Yep. It's amazing how the early netbooks went from new hotness to piece of rubbish simply because Linux left them behind.
I pulled out my old eeePC 700 a few weeks ago and couldn't find a single currnet distro that would install on it. So it's stuck with the one that came with it and the old Firefox browser, both of which are probably full of security holes.
> couldn't find a single currnet distro that would install on it
Not even Debian? Mind you, I'm not aware of any other distro that's both current and has 32-bit support... And the Asus eeePC 700 is a potato by modern standards. (I mean, 2GB SSD? At least it can easily be made to boot from an external SD card.) But even the bulk of netbook-class hardware is well supported, AFAICT.
I have an eeePC 900a (?) - It came with, IIRC, a 32 GB SSD and 1 GB of ram - I ended up putting 2 GB in it, and a 128 GB SSD; made it much more comfortable (for all that's worth). Still a dog CPU - but for what it is, it ain't too bad. Somewhere, if I am ever brave enough to delve into doing it, I have a camera upgrade for it. I also think I got a GPS upgrade for it too that I need to install (can't remember; there were a couple of pieces the next model up had that I didn't get at the time - and the parts could be bought on ebay not too long ago, so I grabbed 'em).
Presently there's a bug in Haiku's Intel video driver on EEE PCs. If you enable VESA video in the bootloader, it should work just fine; I know plenty of people who say that Haiku its the best OS for netbooks. :)
I don't have any issues with Debian and lightweight environments such as LXDE and Xfce, let alone something even lighter like i3wm. Even MATE is pretty good. The biggest issue with old hardware is having enough RAM for the modern web, but FF Quantum makes things quite tolerable even on as little as 1GB, at least for now.
Old computers and hardware are awesome for several reasons, specially if you really enjoy tinkering with computers!
- Linux/Un*x compatibility is usually pretty good. and those OSes are good for tinkering and producing new stuff. You can reuse your old boxes for staging servers and test beds.
- Old hardware forces you to learn more about how the hardware works and how to optimize your toolset. No, you don't need that insane number of daemons that run automatically if you install a vanilla distribution like Ubuntu. It is a nice stance against this ongoing trend of consumerism and disposable hardware.
We are wasting and rebuilding and tearing apart all our hardware each 2-3 years just for the sake of having that new instruction corrected in microcode or for having a conversational piece. it's bollocks.
We now have some insanely fast consumer processors which gives us the power to run and simulate real time graphics, audio synthesis, AR, etc.... but following the same trend, software is becoming more and more inefficient.
Some software solutions now require several hundred megs of binaries and local web servers and dlls and whatnot to solve the simplest of use cases. We have text editors and music players that now need a full Node.js server instance and a separate build of Chromium running just for doing shit that we used to get by with a tenth of ram and processing power. Thank god we still have some survivors like foobar2000, notepad++ and etc.
The effect of that inefficiency on us is that we get to do the same things we did 10 or 20 years ago (study, read, code, listen to music?), only using way more cycles for nothing.
Besides very few people running insanely complex simulations (which when scaled, are gonna be run on clusters or AWS anyway), most power users don't need that multicpu rig with 128 gigs of ram.
I have 2 old laptops now and one of those is a pretty usable 2010 Macbook with 3gigs of ram. It ran Mac OS X dog slow but now with Xubuntu, it's still pretty usable. And when XFCE starts becoming too bloaty, this box is gonna allow me to study tiling window managers and more lightweight customizable distros like Arch. The net effect is me studying more, which is always a win.