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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

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

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 :-(

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 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 (*)

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.

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