Hacker News Reader

Comment by stx | Hacker News Reader

Back in the early 2000s I did not have much money and but was able to get my hands on all sorts of slightly exotic and out of date computers for free. People just gave them away. I really enjoyed running Linux on old SGI or Apple computers. Over time however the novelty wore off and I realized that even old x86 hardware was cheaper and faster. Any people running Linux on some rare old hardware care to share why?

It can be a great learning experience though.

View on HN

Same here. In the late 90s when I started in tech I worked at this defunct consulting co. doing life cycle support at Motorola's corporate headquarters. They just threw away old hardware so I scored some old Macs and a Next pizza box. My first experience with Linux was running it on some m68k Macs I saved from the trash compactor. Later I salvaged enough parts to get a couple PowerPC Macs running and installed Debian on them. I turned one into a firewall/router and ran a web server on the other. Repurposing old hardware was kind of like our generations equivalent to buying a Raspberry Pi. :)

> Any people running Linux on some rare old hardware care to share why?

It's called retro-computing and it's simply a hobby. You could also ask why people are fixing, maintaining and driving around with cars that are decades old.

It's also a very good method to learn everything about kernel development and maintenance. On x86, there are enough people looking at and working on the code, so you will have a hard time to find things for improvment.

The m68k port, on the other hand, has many places where you can help with improving the code and therefore get your feet wet with kernel development.

Maybe some companies are interested in this as well. As I know from work, the PLC manufacturer Pilz [1] e.g. uses 68k type CPUs in some of the products.

[1] https://www.pilz.com/

I think you answered your own question at the end there.

Then again, my father in law still refuses to buy new computers and will literally run them til they blow out.

So their is definitely someone out there keeping the thing running.

You don’t need old hardware to verify the speed differences. If you just take a browser in i3wm on bare arch Linux install that will be faster than in windows10 on the same machine. At least snappier. It’s just significantly lower overheads in Linux because you can tailor to your needs and remove all bloat. Also windows GUI is just more taxing on the system compared to Linux so that is going to be better at rendering something like a simple browser. Linux is slightly faster in some benchmarks(like geek bench) but overall the differences are minor when comparing apples to apples. It’s things GUI related where Linux has the edge in performance and some of the recent games have for some reason performed better on Linux than Windows according to an LTT video which is due to some real interest and development in Linux gaming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com