Before installing Linux, I had originally planned to dual-boot on my main PC, but somehow a gaming rig from 5 years ago isn’t good enough to run windows 11, which is ridiculous.
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Tux: What 4 GB RAM? This is some gourmet shit.
Tell that to the modern web though.
Fuckin’ a man. My backup server uses 70mb of ram, My NAS, 250mb. My laptop, about 1GB doing normal usage things. Open up one webpage with a YouTube video embedded and the processor constantly runs all 4 cores at 30%+, fan is on high, 3GB ram getting eaten away at for a paused video and text. It’s ridiculous.
I don’t know how youtube does it, but decoding a video, say with libavcodec(ffmpeg) without GPU acceleration is pretty demanding. They could do it on their server and send you the stream, but then again they’d save a lot of money not doing that.
But I agree it shouldn’t take so much when nothing is happening, the web has very much become so bloated.
YouTube is so much less efficient than mpv for some reason, it’s goofy asf
True, but in the end it’s ffmpeg doing the work for both (at least on a linux system).
God, I love Linux nerds.
That is a glorious pizza box computer.
If they stopped showing so many ads, maybe they’d leave enough memory to run an operating system.
I recently picked up a couple of e-waste laptops, Thinkpad x130e’s with an AMD E-300, 4GB RAM and a 320GB spinner. For the pair I paid $60 shipped. These were low-end semi-ruggedized laptops meant for students released around the time that HBO started showing Game of Thrones.
I’ve put Debian on one and it runs great. All the hardware just works, everything is pretty quick after boot, and I love how rugged and portable it is. Email, writing, basic productivity, hobby development and 2D gaming all work great. Web browsing takes a hit if I open too many tabs, the video card is too underpowered for most 3D games that came out after 2010, and large compiles are slow. I’m a bit worried about the aging HDD so I’m going to replace it with a cheap SSD which should help with boot and compile times.
The other one I’m not sure about. I’ve tried HaikuOS and the video and wifi work well and the whole system feels very snappy, but there’s no audio or webcam support. Redox seems interesting but needs a whole lot more hardware support. I’ll probably just end up cloning the first one unless I can get a better suggestion.
All that is to say, Linux is great on old cheap hardware.
Even the cheapest SSD you can find will improve the performance quite significantly.
i use some of those low power soc laptops, running with lid closed (heat is basically a non-issue), for pihole, white noise, and a few other ‘little’ things. one of 'em is even running stuff in VMs (the rest are debian-based dietpi).
