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AnthonyMouse 47 minutes ago [-]
The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?
forinti 7 minutes ago [-]
Intel mobile chipsets for Core 2 Duo only supported 2 or 4GB. And not all the desktop chipsets supported 8 or 16GB. I have a laptop with 3GB: one of the slots only supports 1GB.
ValdikSS 1 hours ago [-]
And not a word about MGLRU and its settings. It has the biggest impact on performance on lower-end PCs, especially with low amount of RAM and slow HDD.
Here's a post from "le9" patch user which was created by ChromeOS developers much before MGLRU, but exploits the similar idea: keeping the essential file cache in RAM for as long as possible. It's usually night and day on low-end machines.
I had never heard of it, but checking it, I see MGLRU is enabled by default on my kernel (Mageia 10 with 6.18.xx). Are there distros where this is not enabled? Especially the ones mentioned in the blogpost? In that case it would need a recompile of the kernel, right? Or send in a bugreport to the distro.
ValdikSS 53 minutes ago [-]
For HDD, it also needs to be tuned. In its default configuration, MGLRU 'just' manages multiple generations of working sets, but there's a min_ttl_ms tunable which tries hard to prevent file cache from being reclaimed, which is not enabled by default.
You'd want to set it to 300 or 500, or even 1000 for the HDDs. Around 100-200 for SSDs/EMMCs helps as well.
And for anonymous pages swapping, you'd want to do that on zram (compressed swap in RAM). It also make wonders. You don't want to touch the (old) disk for that.
My old laptop from 2006 has an ATI x1600. I remember that I lost v sync with kernels past 3.something so I had to put the kernel on hold while the other packages updated around it. That was around 2012. Maybe the issue is fixed by now but old graphic cards can make an old PC run only as a headless server. It's been years since I booted it.
type0 1 hours ago [-]
I have one Nvdia system where it's locked to their drivers in BIOS meaning I can't use AMD. Now Ubuntu has dropped support for old GeForce it's essentially a brick, thanks Nvidia and Canonical.
NoboruWataya 28 minutes ago [-]
I had a similar experience trying to use an old laptop with 2GB of RAM. I was surprised how much it struggled with basic tasks. I remember my first computer with 32MB of RAM. Obviously we live in a different world now but still, it's not like I was trying to do anything more ambitious than what I used to do on that PC.
Borg3 7 minutes ago [-]
Its a pathetic world.. and sad.. I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory
commit is 370MB.. If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling, I really get shivers... WTF?! How is that even possible? Bloat is astronomical and yet.. Most people just does NOT care...
pansa2 27 minutes ago [-]
What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler.
Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?
srean 1 hours ago [-]
Anyone remembers Ross technologies ?
When I was a student mucking around the trashed corner of a retired hardware room, I found a very dusty box that looked promising. It was a Ross hyperstation.
I was able to install Arch Linux and Debian on it. But I think it had some corrupt RAM and would crash after a few days if lucky or hours if not. That was a pity. This was the first system where I could see 4 cpus and had got pretty excited. This was a time when there were rumours of Intel dual cores going around. I was planning to run it as our NFS file server.
I was able to bootstrap GCC on it too, after a few tries.
danielabinav160 56 minutes ago [-]
Swap the HDD for an SSD first makes more difference than the distro choice.
haunter 3 hours ago [-]
And you can go even smaller with TinyCore Linux [0] or the xwoaf-rebuild [1]
Honestly it comes down to what do you mean by using Linux. In 2026, or well at least since the mid 2010s, the biggest hurdle will be the web browser. Do you need that? If yes then you are already in the higher system requirement pool. If not then pretty much anything goes, like the options I mentioned above. And even then you can use curl, wget, aria2 etc to access online content to some extent
muterad_murilax 2 hours ago [-]
> And you can go even smaller with TinyCore Linux or the xwoaf-rebuil
Sure, but in this time and age, do they really have to settle for such extreme 90s looks as defaults? I mean, Windows XP Media Center Edition can surely be considered as "lightweight" today and it featured the gorgeous Royale theme back in 2005.
ladyanita22 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is what always surprises me with modern software targeted towards low-specced computers.
Windows XP run fine in 256MB ram computers yet it could be altered to make it look fantastic, with the Royale or Royale Noir themes.
I guess even Linux back then could be made beautiful on similarly specced computers. Yet, AntiX or even LxQt is hideous despite consuming more resources!
keyringlight 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of customization. I think partially it's down to the platform many use (many seek to theme mobile OSes), but the tools to do so has to be a large contribution. I'm not aware of anything like Stardock's Skin studio that exists outside windows, and from looking at their website it's now useless for anything past win10 1909. Having their art seen on widely used platforms (OS or applications) has to be a large draw to it as well.
littlecranky67 3 hours ago [-]
I use Pop_OS! on my old 2014 Macbook Pro (16 GB LPDDR3, i5-4278U with 4 cores). It runs superbly with Gnome3. Given that it is 12 years old now and the latest supported macOS version with opencore legacy patcher was stuttering and unusably slow, there is a second life now for the machine. I mostly use it as a headless home server, the built in battery serves as UPS, keyboard and trackpad make it easier to setup and debug things.
I changed the battery myself (50€ replacement from Amazon) and it looks as good as new (one benefit of the aluminum chassis and glass display is that they can be cleaned quite well). Hardware support from Linux for those intel machines is great nowadays: WiFi, Bluetooth, trackpad etc all work.
nasretdinov 2 hours ago [-]
It's interesting how on a server 2 GiB of RAM can get you quite far, however on a desktop that's pretty much the minimum feasible amount. It used to be the opposite: servers needed plenty of RAM and CPU compared to desktops
AnthonyMouse 37 minutes ago [-]
Personal servers never needed much in the way of resources. They only did, and still do, when you have a lot of simultaneous users. The database servers at Google or Microsoft don't have 2GiB of RAM. They plausibly have 2TiB.
ivanjermakov 2 hours ago [-]
My free tier 1GB GCP instance is doing quite wel as a reverse proxy into my private network. Although traffic is very low.
CTDOCodebases 1 hours ago [-]
Alpine Linux Combined with OXWM isn't a bad idea. If your install is small and you have enough ram it's possible to run it from RAM with persistence.
I would advise against using Lubuntu in favour of MX Linux or AntiX for older systems.
linzhangrun 3 hours ago [-]
For "older but not truly retro" devices, I personally recommend linux mint. I have a fx6100 running it.
liendolucas 1 hours ago [-]
If you think Linux is a good candidate for older hardware (which it is) wait until you try a BSD.
applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago [-]
Don't get your OS recommendations from an LLM-generated article.
s3arch 3 hours ago [-]
>The honest assessment: If the machine cannot run a lightweight Linux desktop at a usable speed after you have applied the optimizations in this guide, it is time to recycle it responsibly. Most municipalities have e-waste collection programs. Do not throw it in the trash. The components contain recyclable metals and toxic materials that need proper handling.
This is the whole point.Linux helps in that judgement whether to keep or throw the box.
dmzxnico 3 hours ago [-]
Agree with you.
Linux itself is a good OS, even better when you have an old machine to "revive". But when even Linux can't run properly, time ditch it...
lstodd 3 hours ago [-]
If you can't run linux you can always run netbsd. or any *bsd.
Besides the advice on ditching hardware on account of thermal problems is .. terrible. If you went so far as installing obscure linux distros, surely unscrewing a few screws and applying a vacuum and then some thermal paste isn't out of reach.
userbinator 3 hours ago [-]
Or sell it to the retrocomputing community for a decent amount of $$$.
Alien1Being 3 hours ago [-]
OS/2 might also be an option on some of this older hardware.
Here's a post from "le9" patch user which was created by ChromeOS developers much before MGLRU, but exploits the similar idea: keeping the essential file cache in RAM for as long as possible. It's usually night and day on low-end machines.
https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/multigen_lru.html#thr...
You'd want to set it to 300 or 500, or even 1000 for the HDDs. Around 100-200 for SSDs/EMMCs helps as well.
And for anonymous pages swapping, you'd want to do that on zram (compressed swap in RAM). It also make wonders. You don't want to touch the (old) disk for that.
Here's my old article (before MGLRU): https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/linux-for-old-pc-from-2007/en/
My old laptop from 2006 has an ATI x1600. I remember that I lost v sync with kernels past 3.something so I had to put the kernel on hold while the other packages updated around it. That was around 2012. Maybe the issue is fixed by now but old graphic cards can make an old PC run only as a headless server. It's been years since I booted it.
Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?
When I was a student mucking around the trashed corner of a retired hardware room, I found a very dusty box that looked promising. It was a Ross hyperstation.
I was able to install Arch Linux and Debian on it. But I think it had some corrupt RAM and would crash after a few days if lucky or hours if not. That was a pity. This was the first system where I could see 4 cpus and had got pretty excited. This was a time when there were rumours of Intel dual cores going around. I was planning to run it as our NFS file server.
I was able to bootstrap GCC on it too, after a few tries.
0, http://www.tinycorelinux.net/
1, https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
Honestly it comes down to what do you mean by using Linux. In 2026, or well at least since the mid 2010s, the biggest hurdle will be the web browser. Do you need that? If yes then you are already in the higher system requirement pool. If not then pretty much anything goes, like the options I mentioned above. And even then you can use curl, wget, aria2 etc to access online content to some extent
Sure, but in this time and age, do they really have to settle for such extreme 90s looks as defaults? I mean, Windows XP Media Center Edition can surely be considered as "lightweight" today and it featured the gorgeous Royale theme back in 2005.
Windows XP run fine in 256MB ram computers yet it could be altered to make it look fantastic, with the Royale or Royale Noir themes.
I guess even Linux back then could be made beautiful on similarly specced computers. Yet, AntiX or even LxQt is hideous despite consuming more resources!
I changed the battery myself (50€ replacement from Amazon) and it looks as good as new (one benefit of the aluminum chassis and glass display is that they can be cleaned quite well). Hardware support from Linux for those intel machines is great nowadays: WiFi, Bluetooth, trackpad etc all work.
This is the whole point.Linux helps in that judgement whether to keep or throw the box.
Linux itself is a good OS, even better when you have an old machine to "revive". But when even Linux can't run properly, time ditch it...
Besides the advice on ditching hardware on account of thermal problems is .. terrible. If you went so far as installing obscure linux distros, surely unscrewing a few screws and applying a vacuum and then some thermal paste isn't out of reach.