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.
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.
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.)
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
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 :-(
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.
It also worked perfectly fine for basic web browsing, including youtube.
Biggest issue honestly was battery life.
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.)
There is no reason for computers to get slower over time. Especially on linux.
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
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?
- your framebuffer is hardware accelerated
- your systemd doesn't have any timeouts or service hangups
- run a lightweight environment such as fluxbox
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.