Outside some couple of well maintained boards (you know which one), the rest is just kept together "working* by using some obscure patches around some specific tags or git repositories, that meanwhile get deleted or archived. And if you want also GPU acceleration, then you might be out of luck in many, many cases
I wish the world would keep staying on x86 as much as possible, since it's battle-tested and has broader support than ARM.
This was the target for IBM OS/2, and they had little interest in the flat memory model of the 80386.
OOP based, SOM, Smalltalk as one of the main application languages, CSet++.
It's possible they got lapped by Compaq to the 386 because MCA was so much new and custom tooling and they had to deploy an entire coherent ecosystem on day 1, rather than just saying "It's an AT with a faster CPU."
My homelab/PC setup is roughly 60% ARM/x86, with ARM powering my main rig. I wouldn't care to keep the x86 stuff around, except I need to keep building/testing on x86, and most of these machines are still far from EOL.
If you'd also consider appliances like Switch or Apple TV, then a combined ~99% of my gaming is also on ARM. (Waiting to see how Stormgate will fare here.)
> Outside some couple of well maintained boards (you know which one) [...]
Vote with your wallet. The Raspberry Pis are back in stock, and they're great.
Need more power? The new Macs are absolutely great. I'm eyeing Asahi Linux too. It seems it can't do USB-C video yet, which is how I've so far avoided having a KVM switch.
> [...] "the 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage may be a letdown" [...]
Sounds very decent for something you'd throw in your backpack for a quick trip to the server room.
Of course YMMV on each and every use case, 3 years ago I was the one throwing rocks at ARM Macs, but we've come a very, very long way.
Unless something changed very recently, Asahi can’t do any external video on the Mac Books (only HDMI on the Mac Mini, and maybe not all variants thereof).
External video on Asahi Linux is the only thing keeping me from considering a Mac Book Pro purchase. I simply can’t stomach working without a 27” 4K monitor.
14" and 16" MacBook Pro supports HDMI out, but not USB-C displays (yet)
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Unless you boot a full linux in a VM, but that comes with a worse performance.
In developer mode, it is a perfect travel laptop for me as I mostly just need node and chrome dev tools.. but it would be nice, to run just any linux software, without using a VM. (and without having your OS deep integrated with google)
So I would love to have my chromebook with a true linux - but then the glitches will come again in my experience .. even the stuff that is marked as "works" often won't work the same as with ChromeOS. And I don't feel like picking up that fight again.
It's not fully as snappy as a big machine and you would not be able to run a couple of containers / Electron apps / a modern IDE on it. But it's fully usable for 99% of users / use cases.
This planet cannot support many GBs for every human. So called modern computing is an incredible waste of resources, Android being amongst the worst.
Edit: Sorry for claiming 1 GB RAM first. Didn't remember correctly, fixed after turning it on and checking.
Interesting perspective, do you have evidence to support this?
Older computers almost always use more electricity than newer ones, I don't see how this is a real thing.
All I have time to write right now, but check out the concept of permacomputing and frugal computing... [2][3]
[0] https://www.oecd.org/environment/waste/OECD-G20-Towards-a-mo... (p.24)
[1] https://choose.bchydro.com/why-choose-bc/clean-energy
[2] http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html / https://permacomputing.net
In theory it can, in practice todays computers will be unrecyclable e-waste.
This computer is not on 24/7, but only very limited hours. So manufacturing a new one would a relatively high share.
Energy is the reason why I wrote ARM would probably be even better. But the Atom is pretty good too. The machine is fanless and when it was new the battery lasted nearly 7 hours (not for watching videos of course). Now that it's pretty old and still on it's first battery it still lasts several hours. Enough to read some news and do some trip planning.
The differences are marginal; my 7 year old i5 really doesn't use that much more power than a modern i5, if it even uses more power in the first place (I don't have a good way to measure this, and with sleep states and whatnot you really need to measure this to be sure).
A few years ago I calculated how much impact it would be if everyone would run a 30W server at their home 24/7; I originally started doing that because someone said that "everyone should just self-host these things at their home", and I wanted to demonstrate that this would have a horrible environmental impact. And turned out my initial thoughts were wrong, and impact was so small that actually, it didn't matter, and I didn't even both posting my comment.
And even if there would be a difference, energy of manufacture tends to outweigh energy usage of usage. There's a long chain of mining, transport, etc. etc. behind all of that I didn't calculate this, but usually the energy differences really do need to be quite substantial to justify the energy usage of manufacture.
Maybe I was horribly wrong and made a mistake; I didn't re-do the calculations for this comment out of laziness. But I do strongly encourage anyone to actually calculate or look up what the impact is, because initial "it's bad for the environment"-feelings could very well be wrong, and no one is served if attention, money, and effort is spent in the wrong places.
This is non-sensical.
Up to ten years ago most lightbulbs consumed 40-60 watts EACH and no one bat an eye.
Heck, the cristmas lights on my Christmas tree absorb ~60 watts with the default pattern (i know because i measured it). I had to manually set a light pattern that consumed only 20W. And no one is crying about Christmas lighting.
Consuming 30W 24/7 for home is absolutely feasible, all modern homes can do that just by replacing a single old tungsten-based lightbulb with a led one.
The vast majority of energy needed for computers is in the manufacturing. As [1] shows, the embodied energy in laptops has stayed largely constant over the last decade. The best thing you can do for the environment is to keep using an old laptop instead of throwing it out and replacing it, even if the new laptop draws fewer watts from the wall.
[1] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stoppe...
I have something similar (but an even older netbook). I'm using Alpine, i3, and mostly w3m (or Midori if JavaScript is needed). Given that Windows 10 on the netbook was completely unusable, it's impressive how functional it is with Linux.
It cannot handle modern bloat, however. Firefox just eats up memory until the machine freezes and I can't run a single Electron app for too long. Sadly, those make up far more than 1% of my use cases.
Overall, it's nice for distraction-free computing. I learned Common Lisp and Emacs exclusively on that little netbook. I probably would have gotten distracted by some shiny web page partway through if I'd been using my more capable desktop.
Edit to clarify: I'm curious what all you're able to accomplish with your similarly spec'd machine.
I have desnapped it though and download Firefox directly from Mozilla. There is no Chromium on it.
Edit: I know that it would choke on opening an ever growing number of Firefox tabs. I just close them. And I don't run the machine for more than a couple of hours before shutting it down. Don't use suspend at all.
Edit2: It uses swap. Don't remember whether that was the standard setup or whether I added it myself. Of course you cannot rely on swap for responsive operation, but it helps parking some unused data because the desktop/distro is not optimized at all. And it helps you to get over a tight situation when you forget to close something. When it slows down it's a nice reminder to do so.
Edit to add, in case anyone's curious: suspend works for me (but not hibernate).
My lived experience on Alpine, with no desktop environment on 1 GB is that Firefox needs more memory than that. Browsing the super-lightweight HN site is probably ok, though!
sudo modprobe zram
sudo zramctl --find --size 1024M
sudo mkswap /dev/zram0
sudo swapon /dev/zram0 --priority -1Benchmark please.
You know what? You can get a new laptop with the latest i3 that is way faster than a 4 year old i7 for a little more than that, and it comes with a warranty. Yes, warranty is actually useful for many people. And most Windows laptops are worth little after 3 years, so this $300 laptop probably is only good for donations after a few more years.
(If you have any questions, check out reviews, benchmarks and eBay. I speak from my own experience.)
[0] https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8850H-vs...
I am used to everything loading in an instant. I rather waste money than waste time. Money I can make, time I can't.
I am never going to waste time on things like compilation when the laptop next to it can do it faster, yet convince myself "oh but it is better for the planet". I don't know what kind of idiot does that.
(Which is why I did not hesitate to replace my laptop when I found that a new laptop would be 1.5x-2x faster in everyday tasks.)
Fully usable also means that you might have to adapt your your habits: Keeping many tabs open is just being unorganized for many users. For a programmer having to checking the documentation of many classes regularly, each of them on a different page it might be slightly different. But 99% are not developers.
I am developer. When I build Yocto I am glad to have 32 or 64 GB available. When I travel (for fun) I am glad to be able to use 2 GB efficiently, without really suffering from ultra slow reponse times. A couple of seconds here and there have not spoiled my leisure time.
It depends on the software. When the developers are targeting the "average user", then everyone who uses hardware that's significantly older than average will be punished accordingly. This doesn't mean it's actually hard to support that old hardware, it just means that performance isn't a priority.
If everyone used old hardware for longer, then the software would support old hardware better.
Also, latency has been going up over time rather than down: https://danluu.com/input-lag/
This is more of a social problem than a technical one.
Any models you would recommend to check? I haven’t been in look for Chromebooks for years (like 5 years). I would rather buy small and tiny, and also very cheap. As my use-case is just slacking with it around the house.
If it's supported and I'm comfortable with the method for disabling write-protect then I pull the trigger.
I usually install xubuntu, but on a couple models I've found Ubuntu/Debian based distros have some issues with the trackpad, but Fedora running XFCE works fine, so you may want to go straight to that if you're comfortable with Red Hat.
I doubt that’s true at all. For starters 2GB ram is unusable if you want to have multiple tabs with resource heavy sites like YT open
> This planet cannot support many GBs for every human
Why? I’m pretty sure it can
Ads waste incredible resources at the edge and in the cloud. 99% completely useless because people just hate them. And the remaining less than 1% even more harmful, manipulating people to buy nonsense products nobody needs.
So yes I occasionally watch a Youtube video if it seems really useful. But that's not a tab I would keep open a second longer than absolutely needed.
> Google is a major lead for destroying the planet.
Depends on how you define “major”. It’s still relatively insignificant
One limitation I often encounter is that a site with lots of HD XL images, or JS demos with 3D libraries force a lot of background apps to be killed.
In most cases this is also fine, but keeping a VPN alive whilst browsing media heavy sites is becoming a factor that I'm thinking of retiring this beloved phone
https://m.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_a3_(2016)-7791.php
Currently runs Android 11, but there are Lineage Android 12 builds in alpha. I might update if I feel the need.
It can and it does.
It happens a lot.
And I can't blame people for complaining. I blame the bad Electron apps.
my 9 year old laptop, a 2nd gen i5 running, albeit with 4G RAM, can handle quite a few Electron apps. At the same time as Gnome, Postgres, the Java hunk that is Jabref, some python apps, Thunderbird and Firefox. Electron's really the minnow.
Works a treat for 99% of users and use cases.
Well, I can, but all I get to use are Android apps.
> but all I get to use are Android apps.
given that winxp runs inside most browsers, i'd rekon there is some kind of vm technology available to escape the android ecosystem.
Not when android manufacturers/google refuse to give me the type of control that open posix systems provide. Android is a useless hostle system for people like me (and it's not because of improved security).
If you feel inclined to mention the BSDs, how are those upstream contributions from Apple and Sony going?
Can you provide an example of how Android does not give you the control that you seek, how it is useless, or how is it hostile? From my point of view Android is much more suited for being an OS targeting consumer usage than a POSIX clone. POSIX comes from a world with much different requirements that do not work in the modern world.
It tries, but between things like Firefox for Android not supporting hotkeys and chrome for Android not supporting middleclick, it seems like every typical Android app has some type of resistance to desktop usability in addition to their regular anti-user designs.
Then the internal WiFi card broke after a year and couldn't be replaced. I couldn't be bothered to mess with a USB WiFi -- it was supposed to be for convenience! So it went to the thrift store after that.
My Asus 1215B still has Ubuntu on it, latest LTS, since the broadcom driver was replaced, several distributions ago, the free alternative never managed to hold a wlan connection stable enough for long downloads, I have always to plug into LAN.
Even Crostini running alongside ChromeOS has restrictions regarding hardware support.
What would be the 4GB analogy in that case? Stamina before swap?