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So I have thought for a long time about an Office Of Reference Computing which releases a new Democracy Laptop once every ten years. For the rest of the decade, the design stays unchanged save for necessary bug fixes. As much as possible it employs open standards; when it cannot it sets an open standard. The ORC are the opposite of Agile...
I could get behind this idea. I know of people who use their ThinkPads way past their expiration date. I'd worry about ending up with something like an Atari 800.
Distribution: Mainly Devuan with some Tiny Core, Fatdog, Haiku, & BSD thrown in.
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I've been using pre used computers for many a year now, Linux & BSD thrive on them....
(I was using a 2006 laptop until fairly recently, but I have swapped over to using ultra small desktops &/or thin client computers now, but they are still several years old, but running Linux/BSD, are fully functional & up to date, system wise.)
I like that article. I haven't built a machine with new components in the last 12-15 years. The only "NEW" computer I own is a Chromebook my wife got me. My main desktop, which I still run a number of games at near max settings is a non K intel 3770, 16g ram. The video card was the only somewhat recent piece of hardware, RX570. Not super recent games mind you. I've always been a WoW addict along with Skyrim and such. The wife plays Minecraft as well with all kinds of high res texture packs.
I use pre-loved kit too, but you can go too far. My main Lenovo desktop machine (Bigboy), which I bought second-hand from Computer Exchange, still functions well although I recently had to replace the hard drive to prevent a threatened catastrophe. But my old laptop (Littleboy) barely functions at all now. It has too little memory for any modern system, even AntiX, and very weird Via Chrome graphics which don't play at all well with modern kernels. I had been running AntiX-21 on it, but it limped badly, and I can't install AntiX-23 or even run it live. So I've had to install the new AntiX on Bigboy alongside Slackware and LFS.
Now I don't know what to do with Littleboy. I hate to throw kit away, but this isn't really fit even to be given to a child.
Did you see the date of that? 2008! I have found a few similar things browsing around, but nothing really up to date.
File server lets you connect from other computers - store all your files on it, & keep your good computer's disk free, (or, use a thin client to access the files on your server).
(Just a simple use for an under powered computer.)
Yes, I did see that it was an old post, but just thought there might be newer driver software available.
Sorry to come in so late. That thread relates to Via open sourcing their video driver in 2008. That didn't matter, because nobody was going to learn from them.
Via (along with SiS) released lousy PC hardware chipsets in the early 00s. Sales hit zero, and they were both bought over. Whoever has the Via brand tried some making some cheapskate x86 stuff for embedded x86, but they don't seem to have released hardware after 2012.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_VIA_chipsets
SiS changed direction and seem to be trading still.
Last edited by business_kid; 11-06-2023 at 11:47 AM.
I could get behind this idea. I know of people who use their ThinkPads way past their expiration date.
I have an older T420 Thinkpad sporting 8 GB RAM, an i5 CPU @ 2.4 GHz, and a 120 GB HD. It's happily running Slackware64-15.0 and XFCE. It just won't die.
My Main Daily Driver PC is just 3 years old but my only laptop is a 2007 Thinkpad T61P. Thanks to a community produced customized BIOS which unlocks a number of features Lenovo chose not to activate upon release (and apparently forgot about subsequently), it runs a Core 2 Extreme X9000 at 2.8GHz, has 8GB RAM, and runs SATA v2. With a cheap SSD drive it runs everything I throw at it quite well including Slackware 15.0 and OpenSuse 15.3. It even operates very well with no Xruns as a portable DAW with the latest Pipewire audio system. I don't foresee it going obsolete anytime soon.
My initial cost was $90. I put $190 into it to get the new CPU, RAM, and SSD. I'm more than satisfied. After seeing Joanna Rutkowska's symposium video entitled "Towards (reasonably) trustworthy x86 laptops" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcwngbUrZNg )
which noted this series of Intel CPU was the last to not have the proprietary built-in spy features I started looking specifically for this model.
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'model name'
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz
uname -r
6.5.9-arch1-1
time {
for i in {1..100000}; do
echo "$i"
done
}
real 0m6.445s
user 0m0.715s
sys 0m0.419s
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