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Comment by cat_plus_plus | Hacker News Reader

Fun as a hobby, but power draw of older computers is unlikely to make using them financially or environmentally friendly long term. One can get a stick PC for $100 or a Linux capable Chromebook for $200 and these will be faster and vastly more power efficient compared to old hardware.

For explicit hobby use, I prefer tinkering with software common at the time these systems were new. Then I get to play with different UI and some apps/games/peripherals which do not work with emulators, or are better on the real thing.

"Newer old hardware" might be different, but it's also less likely to need special distros. I have a 2013 Macbook Air running Sonoma thanks to Open Core Legacy Patcher. Everything works fine with patched stock OS. But practicality of Pentium 4 is a stretch.

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Using inefficient old electronics is significantly more environmentally friendly compared to scraping it and using something new.

The vast majority of energy used and environment damage caused by computers happen when they are manufactured. The lifetime energy use afterwards is a tiny fraction.

As someone who collects old inefficient machines, I can appreciate the sentiment but that doesn't exactly reduce the electric and cooling bills.

I would be very surprised if this was true with a compute stick as a replacement for a 100 watt old desktop with hardware that does not implement proper power management. Just how bad is compute stick manufacturing process?

it holds true within the same class of hardware, and not only for computers.

the carbon footprint of producing a new car can hardly be offset through the efficiency of a new one. substitute an old pickup truck for a new three-door ev, totally worth it for the environment.

> One can get a stick PC for $100 or a Linux capable Chromebook for $200

There are many places in the world where this isnt true.

the environmental cost of manufacturing a new computer is pretty significant, only looking at ongoing usage energy costs seems shortsighted

How do you find the performance for day to day use?

My MBA early 2017 (i5/8GB/256) is always nagging me to upgrade to Big Sur, but I did that once (via clean install) and it was terribly slow.

Within a few days I was clean installing 10.15 again, back to a fast snappy experience.

No complaints, but I mostly use mine for web/video/e-mail/casual image editing. I do have an even older 17 inch Macbook Pro that I keep on Mojave (using another toolkit from dosdude1) to play old 32 bit Mac games.

It's also not a given that post Big Sur versions would be even slower, Apple's optimization efforts can fluctuate release by release.

Got an older MBP in my house, older OS. Got a warning on that that we won't get newer Chrome. It's almost frozen in time. Netflix will stop working soon I've heard. As long as Jellyfin works we'll keep it.

I use FF instead of Chrome, and macports for 95% of things which (to my knowledge) still install the latest version of software.

Brew started compiling everything recently though so migrated most things to macports...

Try Opencore Legacy Patcher or patchers for older but still supported OS versions from dosdude1?

Just buy used and you can get much better value

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