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Comment by sunsipples | Hacker News Reader

I am also against a throwaway society but there comes a point where you need to accept old computers/vehicles/toys/instruments/tools are beyond your ability to maintain/use them. If you want to fork over some money semi-regularly or learn how to do it yourself, it becomes an ornament. Somehow expecting 20 year old computing hardware to be supported now, free of charge, in Linux is a valid criticism. 20 years ago, setting that computer up was a nightmare for non tech-savvy folk but current distributions need to support your horse and cart.

edit "but many over pay for the best of everything simply because they are unwilling to understand what they really need or learn how to make do with less" - old man yelling at clouds

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It's also trivially easy to pick up five year old computer parts for a few of whichever monetary unit you use. Ten year old stuff will run perfectly and is often free. Twenty year old? That's entering hobbyist territory. The effort required to support those with modern OS'es is completely out of proportion, and makes little sense, and in terms of power consumption such an old computer is not a very sustainable choice either for the performance you'll get.

5 year old enterprise hardware is only now leaving its warranty cycle.

10 year old laptops can take either 8 or 16 GB RAM and have at least 2 cores + hyperthreading. It'll not just run perfectly, but it'll run even the most bloated Linux distributions or Win 10 just fine.

Right, 10 years ago is e.g. Sandy Bridge Core 2 Duo systems. Thinkpad X220, things like that. Potentially even has USB3 and an SSD already, or can be upgraded.

20 years ago is AMD Duron and Pentium 4, pretty much just getting past single-core 1 Ghz (various 1.x GHz variants were announced during 2001). very different world.

X220 is technically 9 years old, that gives you USB3, two SSDs, and a whopping 16GB RAM.

The exactly ten years old X201 is limited to 8GB RAM, but you can retrofit USB3 with an ExpressCard adapter and it can take one SSD. Two with the optional docking station.

It's not 2020 anymore ;) X220 launched early 2011.

Not all X220 models had USB3 though, only the i7 variant did.

That expands your options even more. Workstation laptops of that age could take 32 GB RAM, unlike the shitty little subcompact ultrabooks that could only take 16 GB.

Man, imagine buying a laptop with only 16 GB RAM today.

It's a bit complicated. Linux the kernel no longer supports certain machines for valid reasons. However, many if not most userland tools (with the exception of these that actually use certain CPU extensions) would gladly run on an 386 if compiled for it even if the current kernel version doesn't support it.

The problem is, you need the whole system to support, say, 386. So one solution would be to use the last version of your distro supporting it, and then compile each new piece of software. Realistically, you would use another (modern) machine for cross-compilation of any significant piece of software, and you will definitely encounter some interesting quirks. Nevertheless, it's doable, as long as you are willing to accept you're running an unpatched kernel.

So in a nutshell, install gentoo

Almost infeasible because of much longer compile times and higher memory requirements for doing so.

If you have access to systems capable of doing that, usually the need for using such old systems doesn't exist. Except if you'd like to have some X-terminals, or hand them down (refurbished) to relatives, some community projects, or similar.

I'd go for something like Antix because that way you have access to the almost infinite binary package repositories.

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