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Comment by Sweepi | Hacker News Reader

What also happened in the same time frame according to this website:

  - [1] 1366 x 768 was the strongest growing monitor resolution
  - [2] Dual- and Quad core CPUs went up, 6-16 Cores are down
  - [3] 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM went up, 16/32 GB fell

So it comes down to: More old (ancient?) machines in the Dataset. Why? Unknown, but probably not indicating a trend regarding the hardware people use in the real World (TM) has changed.

[1] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/displays.html

[2] https://www.pcbenchmarks.net/number-of-cpu-cores.html

[3] https://www.memorybenchmark.net/amount-of-ram-installed.html

[from 3dcenter.org : https://www.3dcenter.org/news/news-des-12-februar-2025-0 [German]]

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I feel like it could simply be that some big PC recycler, perhaps in a poorer nation reselling Windows Vista machines for $15 a pop, has decided to run this benchmark as part of their recycling process and it has skewed all the results.

For me it sounds more like cheap ChromeBooks because that is enough for most people's need.

Very little in education needs more computing power than that.

We've just told ourselves that computing power will always grow and that we will always need that growth.

That might not be be true and computers might be like cars: we don't need (want) faster cars, we want cheaper and safer cars. Top speed no longer sells.

Ehhh

Having tried to install a modern Linux on a 2012 laptop, it simply is not as cozy as your memory records it.

For reference even Linux designed for old hardware takes about 6 minutes to boot and even just using the console lags

That’s wild and disheartening. Those machines ran great at the time. I had a 2011 MacBook Air which I adored - it was fast, small and for the day, it had great battery life.

There is no reason for computers to get slower over time. Especially on linux.

The computers don't get slower, and light Linux distros should still work fine.

But what matters is the software you're using, and that will be modern software (mostly). Modern browsers visiting JS-heavy websites, or a heavier office suite than 15 years ago.

And if this is the context, then computers must get slower over time, right?

> There is no reason for computers to get slower over time. Especially on linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

Bodhi Linux is the one I used on a Celeron based system. The distro is purpose built for retro hardware.

I wish I could explain what is going on but it is physically painful to use, like you are remote desktoping over an iridium satellite

Technically the chipset was released in 2008 but I believe this is a 2012 laptop (*)

I suspect those so-called, "zero-cost abstractions".

On what laptop and what distro? Does that PC lack an SSD? I have Ubuntu on a Thinkpad W520 and it does not take anywhere close to 6 minutes to boot, nor does the console lag but it also has an SSD installed.

Does not reflect my experience at all. T420 from 2011 is still completely usable. Haven't clocked the boot-up time but definitely not minutes, more like a couple dozen seconds. Everything worked out of box with latest stable Debian. Can do 2560x1600 over the DP connector, too. This is not even a top-spec model but the slowest i5 available back then.

To be fair, they didn't say /what/ computer from 2011 ran terribly. The Intel Core CPU's were the best back then. There were also Atom netbooks, terrible AMD chips, etc. AMD solidly has the performance crown now, but in 2011 they did not.

Pretty much anything from 2011 that was not a Core i5 or better will probably not run well today unless you use a purpose-built ultralight distro.

How is battery life?

I have a couple of ThinkPad t420s's from 2011 in active use. One has windows 10 the other kubuntu. Key part was installing a $40 sata 2.5" ssd, and both operating systems boot in well under a minute, completely unoptimized.

Big revolution of last 20 years was spinning drives to ssd. Otherwise, my daily drivers are all 8th generation Intel CPUs - I just got a ThinkPad x1 carbon for $300 cad from Facebook marketplace. 7 years old and runs brilliantly. My wife's daily driver is a t580.

Which is all to say I have no idea how Linux is taking 6 minutes to boot or even worse, lagging on terminal - something is horribly wrong there :-(

You're doing something very wrong. Debian Bullseye boots in under 30 sec on my Dell XPS L321X, which was released in 2012 (timed with a stopwatch). I use the machine regularly.

My 2008 MacBook with T8100 and 2GB ram boots Devuan 4 (debian11) in <30 secs and there's no lag. What hardware are you on?

He's probably on some old hardware with a dead fan that is throttling the shit out of the whole system to keep it from letting all the smoke out.

I was just using a 2012 X230 running Arch and it's plenty snappy on the command line or even running an electron based editor (or as good as such a thing can be)

There was no mention of what distribution of linux, just "modern" whatever that means. If the person installs the lastest testversion of some distribution that tries to jam everything in there but does not have actual grapics drivers for the right card, it will be very sluggish. In the meantime my raspberry pi has no problems whatsoever with the latest linux.

Make sure that:

  - your framebuffer is hardware accelerated
  - your systemd doesn't have any timeouts or service hangups
  - run a lightweight environment such as fluxbox

And you should really be fine still.

i host mail with spamassassin, a static webpage, and roundcube.. on a single core 32 bit atom with 2gb ram, 500gb seagate sshd, and debian... via a wireguard tunnel to a gcp instance.

in fact i only admin it via ssh. first to the gcp instance, then to the atom inside the wg tunnel.

its not that horrible.

I used a 2011 i3 dual core laptop with only HDD storage until ~2021 running linux. Boot time was nowhere close to 6 minutes and that was with luks encryption. It was maybe 90 seconds at most.

It also worked perfectly fine for basic web browsing, including youtube.

Biggest issue honestly was battery life.

SSD installs were, for the longest time, the single best ROI on upgrading a laptop. I think a SATA SSD in that 2012 bad boy could considerably boost its performance.

I still do this for friends and family: put in an SSD and maybe add a bit of RAM.

Either, clone the OS or else do a fresh install. The old drive goes into a USB enclosure if it's a laptop.

It feels like a brand new computer, going from minutes to seconds to do anything.

(Going from a Raspberry Pi 4 on a MicroSD to a pi5 with an nvme drive is a similar night and day difference. The pi5 feels like a snappy modern computer. Previous pis always felt slow.)

I am still using a 2012 X230 and it taking 40 seconds to boot already feels slow. Six minutes sounds like an HDD boot, but console lagging? I don't know how that could even happen - I occasionally run OpenBSD on an even older Atom netbook, and even (un-accelerated) X doesn't really lag.

Explain the desktop and server numbers.

Are they currently selling new Chromebooks with 1366 x 768 screens?

Yes

Almost half the Chromebooks on newegg have that resolution: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=chromebook&Order=8&Submit=ENE&...

It helps that the web scales well

Screen resolution on windows/Mac is important because scaling support is so bad that a low resolution is barely usable when all the icons end up huge.

On the web, which scales well, it really is just a matter of blurryness. Plenty of people can live with a slightly blurry screen to save $50.

They're pretty common at low price points. Good displays are expensive, it's an easy thing to cheap out on to lower cost.

As of maybe a year ago, I think essentially all new models are at least 1080p, except maybe that lenovo is still technically making/updating one older model with a 1366 x 768 specifically for the educational market.

However, 1366 x 768 screens were very common in cheaper chromebooks until 1-2 years ago, and most retailers are still selling new old stock of older models with 1366 x 768 screens and n4020 cpus.

(Now a lot of the really cheap models have 1080p screens and n100 or similar cpus which is a massive improvement.)

It has to be something like this. I could believe slower machines growing in market share during high inflation, but nobody's making new laptops or monitors with 1366 x 768 panels.

Apparently Windows XP is the dominant desktop OS in Armenia. They were savvy enough not to go to Vista I guess. (Not that the country is anywhere near large enough to skew global benchmarks.)

As other commenter said, prob has more to do with growth of computing in the developing world. Very little labor now that can't be done by someone living in a country where breakfast costs less than 25 cents. I mean, theoretically at least. Most of those people probably aren't learning from professors who spend their whole day teaching and doing research, and that kind of activity can only be supported by a relatively wealthy society. But, the internet has also democratized a lot of that activity. Well, its complicated either way.

It seems like a similar challenge as looking at the steam hardware survey stats, it's probably the best public source of information but it's too much of an overview to make anything but the most general conclusions from it. Within that data there's going to be millions of different stories if you could divide it up a bit - what are common combinations of hardware, what are common combinations in different age ranges, what is used for playing games of different ages, what's common in different locations in the world. Valve could possibly tie hardware to software purchasing activity as well what is played.

> Most of those people probably aren't learning from professors who spend their whole day teaching and doing research, and that kind of activity can only be supported by a relatively wealthy society.

Nope, as your next sentence says, they're learning off forums, Stack Overflow, YouTube and ChatGPT like the rest of us. :P

Possibly a shift from bulkier older laptops to tablet hybrids?

1366 x 768 definitely sounds like it's just an increase in older machines though.

1366x768 laptops I can find in 10 minutes of searching, all being sold as new, running from $150 to $900

HP 15-fd0023dx ($280, 12th-gen i3, Win 11 S, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" touchscreen)

HP 15-fc0025dx ($580, Ryzen 5 7520U, Win 11 S, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" touchscreen)

HP 15-fd0067nr, 15-fd0077nr ($510–$900, 13th-gen i5 or i7, Win 11 Home or Pro, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" non-touch)

HP 14-DQ0052DX Stream 14 ($230–$280, N4120, Win 11 Home or Pro, 4 or 8 GB RAM, 14" non-touch)

Lenovo IdeaPad 3 ($350, 11th-gen i3, Win 11 Home, 8 GB RAM, 15.6" touchscreen)

ASUS Chromebook CM14 ($155–$280, MediaTek Kompanio 520, 4 GB RAM, ChromeOS, 14" non-touch)

"12th-gen i3" is longer then "i3-1215U" or "1215U", but removes all important Information[1]. Why do you (and people in general) do this? I dont get it.

[1] a search engine will give you the intel ark page if you search for "1215U" which tells you thats a 2P+4E 15W Alder Lake CPU, however "12th-gen i3" could be a 4P+0E, but also a 2P+8E or a 4P+4E, and anything between 9W and 60W Basepower.

As a developer I have not felt the need to buy a performance machine anymore, everything happens on remote machines and build farms.

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