Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

You can browse the web on a ten year old machine just fine.

While clean reinstalling my macOS last month, my recovery partition was lost - and I booted via internet recovery to MacOS Mavericks.

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)

Ten year old software is very different from ten year old hardware.

The parent (you replied to) discussed the state of browsers

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.

In the context of Linux, ten year old hardware is widely supported, and will not limit what base OS version and software is installable, though its capabilities might affect usability. We're not really discussing OS X here, where planned obsolescence is such a huge factor.

That's not really a Linux problem as far as I can tell. You can install a five-minute old Debian-testing on 10 year old hardware without too many surprises.

Main private laptop is an HP elitebook 8440p from 2012 and it works perfectly fine with modern web and streaming, currently running Fedora 36.

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.

8.5 yo for sure and with Ubuntu. I improved it a little (32 GB and two 1 TB SSDs) but I bet that the original 8 GB + HDD would be OK for browsing. Browsers got faster and that helps compensating sites that got slower.

> I bet that the original 8 GB

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/

4GiB is plenty for browsing if you run uBlock Origin and disable Javascript by default.

Well, if you don't run uBlock Origin (or bare minimum another less efficient tracker blocker), no amount of RAM can really save you once you cross the threshold of 60+ tabs open.

If you want to save resources (and that what talking about 2GB machines is) you just don't keep 60+ tabs open. You cannot eat the cake and keep it at the same time. I cannot see how anyone can jump around between 60 tabs every day. If I have more than 10-20 tabs open after a working day I know that the day went in a very unorganized way and I have probably more open tasks than in the morning when I started. It happens because I have plenty of unused RAM on my work machine, but it's nothing I'd defend. Maybe a smaller machine would just force me to organize my work better.

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.

I recently was upgraded away from those exact "old" specs at work, and I largely disagree. Win10 just doesn't work with HDDs. I'm sure the mandatory 3rd party AV doesn't help either. But logging in was enough of a source of pain, that I ended up using my iPhone with a HDMI dongle and a wireless accessories.

It's upgraded now to an overly powerful web browsing machine. I'm a bit happier.

I agree. Win 10 + HDD = frustration.

Win 10 even with SSD is a frustation.

A good $500 PC [1] 10 years ago seems to have a 2x3GHz Pentium, 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. The $1000 PC [2] from tomshardware was a 4x3.4GHz Core i5 with 8GB RAM, a GTX 670 and a 60GB SSD paired with a 750GB HDD.

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...

Absolutely - I am typing this on a 2012 Windows 7 PC, 8GB RAM and an SSD. CPU has a Geekbench 5 single-core score of 400 or something, i.e. in no way fast. But surfing the web is snappy and the computer works fine.

Exactly $499US is all you need even today to get a pretty damn good machine in my book....4.4GHz 12th Gen i5, 4k OLED, 8GB DDR5, 256GB SSD PCIe4.0...from, of all places, Best Buy?

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’m a fan of 10-year-old hardware. In 2012 I was handed an i7 3770 with 8 GiB of RAM and a git URI for WebKit and told go forth and port! I think the box cost $750 and I know it ran the latest Debian. This machine is still my daily use machine with today’s latest Debian, more HDD, some SSD for ccache, and triple the RAM. The original configuration was so nice I bought a duplicate for home use. That one has had its video card upgraded and the HDD replaced with SSD, it gets used somewhat differently. The graphics upgrade was to match it to a 21x9 screen I splurged on. And it runs Windows 10 decently enough.

If you limit yourself to sane, 1.0 web simple pages such as Hacker News, sure. If you need to visit anything using unoptimized 100+ MB of Javascript? Good Luck.

Are you trying to tell me that you can't browse the modern web on an Ivy Bridge-era system?

Either it's not that bad, or people are lacking patience.

I have a Phenom II desktop next to me that browses the web just fine. Yes, even YouTube and infinite scrolling pages.

Same here. I have a Phenom II X6 desktop and it has no problem browsing the modern web running either Linux or Windows 10.

I'd really like to see that "not that bad".

> 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 it's not instant, it's a bug

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?

Yes, remember that the netbook trend died in 2013. A netbook is a Ivy Bridge-era system.

Those were awful, especially the first gen, but I have fond memories of them since it was the first time young me could afford anything new and shaped like a laptop.

The MSI Wind U100 with an Atom N270 CPU would even overclock. It didn't help, but it would do it.

If that's allowed, you can't browse the web on an Alder Lake-era system.

I was on my good old 2500k until 2019. It was perfectly and I only upgraded because I had the itch

For a 20 year old machine, sure. But any machine that was decent 10 years ago should be at least okay today. My 2008 Thinkpad handles all but the heaviest websites without too much trouble, as long as I don't have too many tabs open at a time.

This is a fair point, the machine I am using as a reference was pretty bad at best even when it was new (a 2012 netbook).

Agreed, I am using a 2009 Toshiba laptop with Pop! on it, I did some cheap upgrades (maxed RAM to 10GB, used a spare SSD to replace the old HD), it's perfectly usable.

How is hacker news a 1.0 website? It's full of JS and dynamic elements. It might be aping the style of 1.0 web but it is very much a web 2.0 site.

> It's full of JS

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.

Compared to the size of the site, and the features? Yeah, most of them involve some amount of JS. Besides, HN is all dynamic user generated content, that's the crux of web 2.0.

How I perceive it is that web 2.0 is about dynamic loaded content and as far as I know HN doesn't do this but loads static pages from a server just like ye old web 1.0 forum pages would do.

If you go off Wikipedia's definition, it's more about user generated content and HN is definitely that. Might not meet your definition of web 2.0, but it meets this one:

>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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

I'm not going to argue which web it belongs to, just comment that that definition is a bit odd. Forums would fit that definition, and have existed for far longer. phpBB itself is over 20 years old even.

I know it's all arbitrary, but it feels like there should probably be a better definition than the ones given.

At the risk of arguing the semantics of what is ultimately a marketing term rather than a technical term, Web 1.0 did actually have JavaScript - it was usually a simpler, more restrained usage, with no XMLHttpRequest.

Even that might not work. If it came with a succinctly obscure Operating System you run into SSL problems.

Heck, the first gen retina MBP is now 10 years old. It’s definitely still a very capable machine, albeit the Nvidia GeForce 650M GPU is a bit underwhelming, even for non-gaming.

I'm forcing myself to get better at linux using a 16 year old laptop. I expected its age to be the second biggest irritation (after my ingorance), but really it's fine. A tiny bit slower than I'm used to, but for most of what I use it for, it's shockingly capable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com