> Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.
This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrived, we were fucked. We had to go and build our own image with Gnome as the default and install that. It was really stupid, and I never saw our users have any easier a time with Unity than they did with Gnome. It was a gratuitous change for change's sake.
That said, IMO the problem is not so much that Unity exists, but that they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. To be fair, what Google and Apple do to mobile devices more than a year old or so is every bit as bad IMO so I can cut them some slack.
What this has achieved for me is a migration back to desktop machines from IPad and Android tablets. My 2013 IPad Air is now pretty much a brick with IOS 9 and my Nexus 7 from 2013 is unusable. Compare and contrast with my 2009 Core 2 Quad desktop that's still going strong.
Finally, consider the hideous electronic waste we generate by effectively forcing people to upgrade HW every year or two.
If you want to be inclusive and spread technology to those that don't have it and can't afford it, you HAVE to support very, very low grade hardware.
They actually did; they just ignored the feedback and insisted that Daddy Mark knows best, completely throwing away all of the reasons that Ubuntu is actually named Ubuntu (namely: they stopped listening to the community).
I was willing to forgive Unity, though (hell, I kinda liked it, at least on systems that could actually run it). It was the combination of repeated awesome-looking but inexplicably-stifled projects (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android) and the Amazon Lens that resulted in me swearing off the community in which I was once happy to be a part.
I have ironically had similar-to-worse results with running 2015 Android on 2011 hardware, which has 512MB of RAM. The cheek!
XP on such machine is not responsive. Maybe it could be usable, if you uninstall half of operating system, and replace most programs (IE with Opera 12.X....). Or better is to use Win2k.
No! Lightweight Linux distro, is your best bet to revive such junk today.
EDIT: fixed typo; I restored a few netbooks in EE, but whatever.
256MB RAM is actually pretty generous for Windows XP, as is the Pentium III; neither were unheard of in "Made For Windows XP™" systems.
General minimum recommended for XP was/is 512MB.