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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

I believe I purchased my present desktop in 2010.

Perpetual donations to debian and apt update; apt dist-upgrade keep it in tip-top shape. The same cannot be said for a growing drawer of phones/tablets that are no longer supported/updated.

(I was glad to see that partial postmarketos support is present for at least some of those devices now. Looking forward to trying that out when I get a chance.)

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"I believe I purchased my present desktop in 2010."

My daily driver desktop, from which I do all of the rsync.net CEO things - from terminal to VMWare - is an octo-mac-pro from early 2009.

Currently running el-cap. Nothing is ever slow. 11 years and counting ...

To be fair, x86 Debian will happily run on a Pentium II from 1998.

"Happily" is a stretch. I ran Damn Small Linux (because puppy actually wouldn't fit) on a 233mhz pentium II, with 32mb of RAM and it was..... semi functional (including allowing the USB 1.0 ports on the motherboard to work!) but multitasking or complex tasks caused it to hard lock up and I was too young and uneducated to diagnose the problems

I think my 440BX motherboard supported up to 384 MB of RAM--that would have helped a lot. You can still get PCI SATA controllers for fast swap. You're still capped at 133 MBps because of PCI, but PC100 RAM only runs at 800 MBps, anyway.

What's amazing about the PII is it's the oldest "modern" computer in a few ways. USB came out around the same time, and i686 is the oldest x86 architecture still supported by modern distros out-of-the-box. i686 will be 25 years old in November. The fact that it's still supported is incredible.

Yes, I still have AMD Duron 800 which runs on Linux

Alternatively, depending on your hardware requirements, you might want to consider taking a look at the Mobian (mobile Debian) project. Only the Pinephone is currently supported, but you get things like `apt` instead of `apk` on pmOS, which is based on Alpine Linux. Both are great projects, of course, and I think pmOS is focused on more devices.

[1] https://mobian-project.org/

Is all of the hardware in that desktop still supported by the vendors? I'd imagine not. Go check the ram compatibility list for the motherboard and see when the newest module was manufactured. This is always the first thing that gets dropped from support.

I installed a couple of new sticks of RAM in the Spring.

In terms of security updates for motherboards and other hardware, they're very rare. For my phones/tablets, some are literally pinned to ~Android 6, with just oodles of known security holes.

rowhammer?

Those phones really should be recycled instead of collecting dust. Of course being usable and secure would be the best, but you can't have everything.

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