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Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

I'm as opposed to throwing away machines as the author is, but I also recognise that anything with less than 1 GB of RAM is unusable in this day and age. Modern websites are simply too large to handle on such equipment, and most people do their work online.

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While I don't agree with the tone, and the expectation that other should ensure that you can keep running a free OS on a 12 year old laptop, there is a point to this website.

I did all the thing I do now 15 years ago on my laptop. Sure video quality have improved, screen resolution have increased and I can do more stuff online, if I want to. All the daily stuff, browsing the web, hobby programming and paying my bills online, why can't I do that with 1 or 2GB of RAM?

We could do 100Mbit networking 15 years ago, or even 20 years ago, so the increased network speed shouldn't be an issue.

Hobby programming and paying bills are relatively lightweight tasks. Using cloud document editors and social media definitely isn't. At best, your computer will have noticable latency and at worst it'll crawl so slowly it's unusable. Check out https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm for some thoughts on this topic that align with mine.

The network speed is by no means an issue. The problem is that all websites feel the need to mess with their DOM and execute megabytes of JavaScript just to do basic tasks. Then your bottleneck becomes the processor speed and the amount of RAM, the latter a larger obstacle in my experience.

Do you mean images and media, since these could be avoided/ mitigated? Or do you mean the browser itself won't work in a constrained environment?

Nope, I mean the rampant abuse of JavaScript where it doesn't belong, but images and media don't help matters any. More info here: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

A Raspberry Pi 1 with 256MB works very well with Pi-hole. It has a lot of free RAM to spare.

I think your posts underlines an important fact: Nowadays more and more tasks require an up-to-date internet browser. These browsers need a lot of RAM. Both their complexity and the websites' is increasing all the time.

Works with Pi-hole as a server, or as a web client? If the latter, I will vehemently disagree. Raspberry Pi 1 was slow with native apps during the time it was released, to use it with the modern web would be painful.

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