• 0 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle





  • Pentium II and 160MB RAM are plentiful, and it is no surprise that NetBSD is a breeze to use on it.

    I got NetBSD running on a ThinkPad 760XD (Pentium MMX, 32MB RAM) which I revived around last summer, and it works just fine. Though running emacs on it is not a smooth experience with my configuration loaded, but it runs well vanilla. With enough tweaking, it can be a capable writing machine, especially with its flip-up keyboard.

    The blog post is really good and insightful. I have never considered connecting aforementioned machine to the internet, but I think I might do it after reading this post just to try out Dillo.




  • Most of the criticism I have seen online stems from how Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) plays fast and loose with the FLOSS ethos. The earliest controversy I can recall was the inclusion of the ‘Amazon shopping lens’ in its Unity desktop environment. There may have been earlier issues, but this one made mainstream headlines in the early 2010s. More recently, the push for Snap (its application bundle format), which relies on proprietary server-side components, which invited criticism.

    That said, I still find the OS ideal for most users. It has been (and still is) a gateway OS for many Windows and macOS refugees, thanks to its strong community. It was for me nearly two decades ago, and I prefer to remember Ubuntu for the good it has done for the community.










  • I have experienced this myself.

    My main machine at home - a M2 Pro MacBook with 32GB RAM - effortlessly runs whatever I throw at it. It completes heavy tasks in reasonable time such as Xcode builds and running local LLMs.

    Work issued machine - an Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM - struggles with Firefox and Slack. However, development takes place on a remote server via terminal, so I do not notice anything beyond the input latency.

    A secondary machine at home - an HP 15 laptop from 2013 with an A8 APU and 8GB RAM (4GB OOTB) - feels sluggish at times with Linux Mint, but suffices for the occasional task of checking emails and web browsing by family.

    A journaling and writing machine - a ThinkPad T43 from 2005 maxed out with 2GB RAM and Pentium M - runs Emacs snappily on FreeBSD.

    There are a few older machines with acceptable usability that don’t get taken out much, except for the infrequent bout of vintage gaming