With a blown motherboard on my main computer I rummaged in the spare parts cupboard and found a system that I actually built in 2011. This is an AMD Athlon II x4 630 with 4GiB RAM and I have been using it for several weeks now while waiting for parts.

What has blown me away a little is that this little system is running -current absolutely perfectly, albeit using my old friend Fluxbox. I have not tested KDE, xfce and friends but I have compiled, run multiple media applications, accessed my email, written documents etc with no slowdown or hitches.

This has left me realising 2 things:

1. My computer needs are actually pretty modest.
2. Slackware + Fluxbox is a beautifully combination for an older computer.

So thanks PV and team for this great distro! And I am a little curious to hear from others with similarly modest hardware running -current...

I'm happy you're having a good experience

I'm running Slackware 14.2 32bit with i3wm on an 11 year old custom build. It has a core 2 duo 6300 @ 1.86GHz processor and 2GB of memory, and it's still very responsive. It can handle XFCE but not KDE.


Hear, hear!

EDIT:

Sorry, overlooked the part about "current".

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With apologies, I would not consider 4GB RAM to be low spec. Most Linux distros will run quite happily with four gigs of random access memory.

I suspect that, if you were to switch to KDE, KDE would run nicely.

But I do agree with you on this: Fluxbox rocks. It is my go-to GUI.

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Everything mentioned is running Slackware64 14.2.

I'm running a gateway server that has an AMD Phenom(tm) 9500 Quad-Core Processor w/8G RAM. It spends most of its time twiddling its virtual thumbs.

My build server has an AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 260 Processor w/16G RAM. It spends most of its time twiddling its virtual thumbs until I run "slackrepo update"; then it spikes the 2 CPUs it has.

The machine I normally use while irritating everyone on the forum has an AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1100T Processor w/16G RAM. I run XFCE on it.

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Good point, I am not entirely sure why in 2011 I put up the cash for 4GiB RAM in the build but I do have a dim memory that RAM was relatively cheap at the time. I have been wrong before though...

Believe it or not I am currently hunting for this CPU which is the maxed out CPU for this old motherboard (with a suitable BIOS update). Not because I have to but because I love fooling around with older PCs .

Prices on the 1100T are still fairly poisonous though but I am still hoping to pick up a reasonably priced one pulled from an older, non-working system...

Athlon II x4 605e at 2.3GHz with TDP of 45W, 4G DDR2 RAM at 1066MHz, Western Digital's Green SSD of 240GB. I know, it is not the best Machine in the block.

But, it runs exceptionally well with -current and KDE4 shipped by Mr. Volkerding.

Also it runs fine with latest Plasma5 published by Mr. Hameleers.

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Seeing as others have mentioned 14.2, I'm going to weigh in as well [sorry, OP]. My netbook runs Slackware32 14.2 with an N270 Atom 1.6Ghz single core CPU and 2GB RAM [screenshot]. I currently use LXDE for a desktop. I'm thinking about moving to Fluxbox but haven't put the time in to learn it yet.

It was my first Slackware machine and has travelled abroad many times with me and has been totally stable all the while. I've learned a lot with it.

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Guess I have a low-spec computer... and here I thought I was rock'en...

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Mine is a little bit better:
Core 2 Duo E7600 at 3.0 GHz and 4 GB of RAM
Been running Slackware since 13.1 on it and it is running fine, both with XFCE and KDE (4.x), no -current for me yet). This is basically a system from 2009 with a few small extensions (like 2 TB 2nd disk and external E-sata disk docking station).

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This is my laptop:

I don't know why in 2018 people still assume KDE is a heavy footprint. My old 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo IBM Thinkpad T61P w/ 4GB RAM runs 14.2-64 with KDE just fine. I even have animation set to "Very Fast" and didn't bother to kill off the so-called Terrible Four. Xfce on the same machine is only about 10% lighter with a lot less features available. Don't get me wrong I like Fluxbox and Xfce but it just isn't accurate to assume KDE is still a memory hog. Especially with Slackware, it isn't.

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But Plasma 5 (and the rest, like KDE Frameworks) is again a lot heavier then the Kde 4 as shipped with 14.2 (and officially still in -current, although a lot of people have replaced it with Alienbob's ktown packages).

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Same here

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Those are also the exact specs I run while irritating everyone on the forum! Cheers

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