This is very well timed for me. I just acquired myself a convenient ancient laptop by installing Linux on a circa 2014 chrome book. It can chug when playing videos, but great for general use.
17 year old Dell here. Threw a SSD and Linux on it and that damn thing boots faster than most brand new Desktops. Absolutely enough to surf the web, listen to music, watch videos or do the usual Linux stuff (ssh, etc.). You can even somewhat game on it via sunshine/moonlight.
I did the same with a Dell Wyse thin client laptop I acquired from work. Upgraded the RAM, popped a larger SSD into it, and installed Debian. Thing works great for the basics and I just RDP into my desktop for more intensive tasks.
Old laptops also make for great servers and hobby computers. If you don’t need the form factor of a pi or mini pc, throw Debian or whatever on an old laptop and play away! I’ve got jellyfin, my DNS, reverse proxy and an octoprint server running on mine. It’s the little heart of our network.
IMO, one of the biggest risks of using a laptop as a server or some type of utility system is that you may not look at it regularly enough to see if the battery has a problem.
Go look at your hardware folks. Just stare at it for a few minutes every few months or more frequently. See if anything looks strange or different about it.
Same here. My old graphics chip wouldnt boot with anything else (I could have searched for the driver somewhere) except lxqt. Thats why I chose lubuntu.
It is pretty awesome for old hardware imo. I tried 5 or six other major distros and nothing worked, inclusing mint, ubuntu, debian (I think) and so on.
Steam has been gradually going down the route of becoming a “pretty” interface instead of a fast one, and it’s kind of sad. Excessive use of dynamic svgs for home page animations, dynamic gradients that slow everything down, and probably some backend changes too, and all baked in with the base UI so it’s less responsive than it was before, even on decent hardware. Seems like it all started with Big Picture and the gradual migration of that design style into the main client.
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