If you need second life for an old pc, It may be better to repurpose as server or something like that.
Hello electron where everything is a browser :)
Yes, even if your system is lean doesn't mean a lot if the application you're using on top still needs a lot of TFLOPs and GBs of fast RAM.
Trying to use a 2GB 2 thread atom netbook here as a dumb terminal of sorts for other systems - a pain for anything that is not very basic limited remote shell. The closest I got to a "working system with browser" was cheating using mosh + browsh on another computer.
Which distro offers x32? (Haven't checked, might be a stupid question...) I understood it was a great idea at the time, but implementation took a while and the world had moved on when it was finally ready.
A lot of modern distros are still packaging for i686, but actually installing it might be a bit of a pain. I think your safest bet is to go with an OS like Debian that's sure to offer ample support for older systems, or you could go for broke and run a distro like Gentoo/Arch/NixOS that has package manifests/build instructions for each tool and pray that nothing breaks (spoilers: it will).
So, temper your expectations; 32-bit systems aren't a huge priority nowadays, but I'm certain you could put together a usable config if you choose the right base system. Or just keep the machines as they are, I'm sure Xubuntu still runs fine.
It allows a virtual screen solution to other computers, even servers. Effectively a private Zoom session.
I just wanted to let you know that this comparison absolutely threw me. Of course you're right, they both let you "screen share" but the way you applied a 2022 metaphor to explain 90s tech made me feel a little weird and old.
I guess nano is kind of like a private google docs.
Back in my day it was pine and pico. We did SMTP both ways. And we liked it!
Actually, it weirds me out that the default editor on most Linuxes now is a pico clone. Some don’t don’t even come with a vi out of box.
I started with emacs in college because I liked LISP. But once I was a sysadmin, I learned vi fast because it was the common denominator between Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, BSD, Linux, etc. and I was in a group that absorbed teams that used all of them. …OK, to be fair, our stuff was BSD :).
My first instinct on a fresh/new to me host is to vi. And even when I type nano, I can’t stop my hands from doing vi and get peeved. Fine ‘apt install vim’ or whatever.
It really annoys me, because I learned vi and never learned pico/nano, but now when I e.g. `sudo systemctl edit foo@bar` on a new box I end up in a nano session and have to figure out how to quit and get back in using vi.
It’s weird. I know distros are trying to be friendly to new users. But aren’t we past “new users” now for server OSes?
I’d get it on a Raspberry Pi or whatever, where you’re going after kids.
But really, the learning curve and foreign nature of the tools is what got me hooked on Unix in 1997. That and not getting cryptic error messages from Win NT that I could actually dig all the way down and troubleshoot. >:[
2 days of frustration followed by Eureka! Repeat.
I still do that process now just with other stuff. (Why is my program doing X? Why the F am I getting a RST?) I think that’s what hooks people that are really into this world.
I do actually understand nano as a default on a “friendly” desktop, Raspberry Pi, etc. targeting new users. I’m just a grumpy old man.
In any case, we were discussing metaphors, not technical details.
I often have to think of that when we share terminals over Google Meet these days and it takes tens of seconds until the encoding artifacts of red fonts have faded away so text becomes reable again. 100 times more bandwidth for a worse experience, that must be progress...
I'd go as far as a third life. This comment sounds like this is written by someone for whom Windows is not the first life (good for you!). To me, restoring an old PC to something usable day-to-day with Linux is only effective if you're switching away from Windows or switching away from the modern web.
you'd be surprised how many people here (and many FOSS zealots in general) live in their own little bubble of command-line-only existence. who eschew modern things like javascript and social media and only want to take part in that which is easily done from a text terminal.
Browsing the web is the last thing i do on an old PC. These old computers are for entertainment. Modern Web is a sh*tty experience.
Needless to say, I couldn't even sign in with Apple ID via browser or app store because the world has moved on & these browsers can't work on modern webpages. (I had to use my phone concurrently to help me out with downloading rescue stuff & moving via USB or terminal)
The problem with this tiny projects is that you need a web browser. And good luck browsing the web in old PCs [...]
As I can imagine now, a lot of things will not run on 10 y.o. hardware once you get limited by the last base OS you could install.
It came out with a core i7 and it supports up to 16GB of ram. I upgraded it to 12GB a few years ago and an SSD.
Caveat: it was a model from the professionnal line, came with free ram slot and is easily disk swappable. The same could not be said of a model from the consumer line that would have had its memory maxed out at 2GB.
It's upgraded now to an overly powerful web browsing machine. I'm a bit happier.
Bookmarks are there for organizing stuff one will need at some time later. Keeping tabs open does not seem to serve any special purpose. Unless you want to save cycles to render it again, but I don't remember many pages I would like to use frequently that even a very old PC does not bring up in decent time. The local weather forecast loads rather slowly, but that I want to reload every time I visit it anyway.
Second source data I collected from the Steam Hardware Survey (that being a biased group with better that average specs) for 2012 seems to point that the "average Steam user" had around 5 GB of system RAM.
> HDD would be OK for browsing. Browsers got faster and that helps compensating sites that got slower.
I just remembered this article (and that article talks about SSDs, not HDDs!) surprising conclusions, posted in HN a few days ago: https://simonhearne.com/2020/network-faster-than-cache/
The $1000 still sounds totally adequate for surfing, office use and some light gaming, as long as you invest $20-$50 in a bigger SSD (or have some patience when starting software). Machines like this are still sold, they're just smaller and cheaper now. Even the 2012 $500 PC is probably fine if you upgrade the RAM, and even without that upgrade is not much different from some of the mini-PCs sold today [3]
1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-pc-overclocking-...
2: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-overclock-be...
3: https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M70q...
Now trust me...Best Buy is pretty much the last place I would look to buy a computer these days, but I have to give them credit for value here even though this system comes with crappy Intel graphics.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-2-8k-oled-lapto...
I have a Phenom II desktop next to me that browses the web just fine. Yes, even YouTube and infinite scrolling pages.
> or people are lacking patience
If it's not instant, it's a bug. I guess this mindset explains why modern software tires me so much..
There's absolutely no "patience" to have with machines whose CPUs can process a dozen Wikipedia (text) worth of information per second
If only developers felt the same way. I'm also exhausted by a lot of modern software. There's not much I can do about the modern web though. I've learned to be patient. Stockholm syndrome.
It was a pretty powerful machine back then - quad core, 16GB RAM, SSD, 1GB GPU. Not a fast machine today by any means, and not my primary machine, but more than adequate for checking email and watching a tutorial on something.
Stick to fast software and it is still a decent experience. Is two or three seconds of loading before the 15 minute YouTube video a long time to wait?
The MSI Wind U100 with an Atom N270 CPU would even overclock. It didn't help, but it would do it.
152 lines of sparse JS ammounting to 5kb uncompressed? Not exactly what I would call "full of js".
For comparison your average hasty made, JS infested legacy web site there embeds Moment.js - and that by itself is 19kb compressed.
>A Web 2.0 website allows users to interact and collaborate with each other through social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. This contrasts the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to viewing content in a passive manner.
I know it's all arbitrary, but it feels like there should probably be a better definition than the ones given.
Wish someone knows how to build chromium into a light-weight mode, e.g. restrict its tab to 1 or 2 only, remove some fancy but not mandatory features, so that I can run it, e.g. with 100MB RAM.
bad news is that some website might be very resource hungry on its own, not sure what to do with that, maybe the browser can also throttle that?
Also rdp/freenx/x2go/vnc can help.
That doesn't make the old computer a full independent desktop but it can avoid sending a perfectly good keyboard/trackpad/monitor in the landfill. And unless you are a dev, 99% of the time you need a browser you already have network and won't point to localhost so that remote faster box can be connecred through vpn anywhere.