Revive your old PC with Linux in 2026. I tested lightweight distros, zram tuning, SSD upgrades, and browser optimization on a 2014 ThinkPad to show you exactly what works.
  • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
    20·
    3 months ago

    on ssd upgrades:

    upgrade usually costs less than 30 dollars for a 256GB SATA drive.

    how much for the time machine to go back to last summer?

  • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    After a quick skim of the article, it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but the author 1. only worked with a single Intel CPU (no AMD devices at all) and 2. could do with a wider knowledge of niche distros.

  • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    TCL runs fine on 192MB of RAM and a PII. But any modern webpage brings it all to a screeching halt.

  • madthumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    3 months ago

    I’d rather use Haiku on such horrible hardware if it’s hardware compatible and I had no other hardware choice. Newer computers can do things far more efficiently, and smart phones costing ~$100 are safer for banking and often more capable otherwise. People try to make Linux the solution to everything when it’s horrible for most things. -It’s cultish behavior.

    • mrbigmouth502@piefed.zipEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      The biggest problem with Haiku is that it has practically no security. It runs everything as root, it doesn’t have user accounts, and the only password it supports is for a screensaver screen locker. I think it has potential, but its security model is completely unacceptable for an online OS in 2026.

      • madthumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Terry Davis has a funny video criticism about Linux and the layers of security for a home or personal OS.

    • kaidenshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Yep, and there are leaner, better Linux distros as well. Void Linux outperforms all of the author’s picks on older hardware, and there are also the BSDs to consider. Hell, even MX Linux (based on antiX) would be better than anything Ubuntu based.

  • historicaldocuments@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    There are four version of x86_64: v1, v2, v3, and v4.

    RHEL 9 dropped support for anything prior to v3. That means RockyLinux doesn’t cover it, either. AlmaLinux has support for v2 in version 10, but there’s no way of knowing how long that will last.

    Some binary packages are starting to drop support for earlier version. The latest numpy out of pip will not work on a v1 machine. You can sometimes use the system package manager’s numpy to work around it, or constrain pip to use an older numpy. I don’t know what else is lurking out there.

    If you’ve got visions of taking a really old computer that you happened to max out on RAM back in the day and bringing it back to life there are surprises waiting for you.