RIP :(
My eeepc sadly died last year, it was a single core laptop i had running hannah montana linux in my bathroom as a music player.
My Precision M6400, a dual core made in 2008, is still going strong and sure, it’s slow, but it still works and has replaced the eeepc in the bathroom so now I can listen to music OR watch videos (not streaming) during my extra long showers. i don’t keep it in the bathroom, it’s on a dock in another room connected to a monitor with a really long dvi-i cable.
Debian 12 let me turn an ailing Gateway Centrino laptop into a media center + game station. It’s technically dual core but it’s 32-bit and really, really goddamn slow. Still, it’s more than fast enough to run everything from the 4th console generation and before, and play a bunch of stuff I snagged with yt-dlp… as long as I made sure it was h264 and 480p or lower. Yeesh.
Still more than enough to make the break room at work amazing.
Literally did this last year with my laptop that would shut down constantly, often unable to even boot into Windows. Figured it was just stuffed cos it’s a hundred years old.
Chucked Mint on, runs like a boss. Happy to say since then I have owned no Windows devices.
Single core? That must be more like 20 years old now.
I don’t believe this meme for a second.
Wikipedia:
The production of single-core desktop processors ended in 2013 with the Celeron G440, G460, G465 & G470.
Those are so weak it’s not even funny.
Intel still makes Celerons that are probably just slightly faster than these
They could have made them even slower if the old architecture doesn’t cost so much more to manufacture.
It’s not common, but you can find some in really cheap chromebooks going back only a few years and those are prime candidates for Linux.
Since they’re Chromebooks aren’t they already running Linux, with ChromeOS being a very light Gentoo, sort of
I’ve never seen one that wasn’t 4 cores
ARM is cheap
They have shitty ARM too, they pull out all the stops on chromebooks.
Dual core, new in 2021, its not alone: https://www.asus.com/us/laptops/for-home/chromebook/c203xa/
Intel also still has some celerons they make with dual cores right now.
Good to know
I guess I know what to avoid
I have an old DV7 dating back to the Bush administration that I should load Linux on.
It did really well from Vista through 7. I haven’t used it in years, but it would probably do fine with Linux.
I remember when a ten year old laptop was just trash, unable to even boot a modern OS. Current hardware capacity exceeds our actual demand by so much that a ten year old computer is still adequate for most users (assuming you aren’t on Windows).
My 8 year old 1080ti graphics card can run most games perfectly fine on a 1080p/60 screen (still the most common spec budget monitor). I would not be surprised if it that PC hits 10+ years of gaming without a real need for upgrade.
assuming you aren’t on Windows
This is the tough part.
I had a 2011 MacBook Pro sitting around some years ago I had upgraded from and I offered it to my brother for his kids to use because of the built in child controls they could setup. He just told me a few weeks ago they were done with it and asked me if I could wipe it or tell him how to do it could be recycled.
I took it back, put Mint XFCE on it but I can’t give it away to anyone I know because it has Linux on it. I’ll probably get a display cable for it and run it as my torrent box.
You can self host a lot on something like that.
Maybe, but I don’t really need it. I’ve got a 2U box mounted in the basement with a Synology DS920+ w/ 48Tb in SHR2 and a mini Asus running Ubuntu doing my heavy lifting.
I just upgraded my seven-year-old Ryzen 1700x/Vega 56 system to Ryzen 5700x3D/RX 9070 XT. It wasn’t because my old system was actually inadequate already, though. It was mainly because I have no idea how long the market is going to be fucked up from the tariffs and wanted to get the upgrade done before the shit hit the fan, just in case.
I thought about getting an M4 MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles for that same reason but I just don’t need it.
100% agree. The computer I have now, I only bought because I needed more cores and ram for my docker dev environment. But I had a Yoga 2 Pro. It worked great and was fast for most of what I needed. I gave the machine to my cousin so he could learn to program on it. Still a fast machine. Doesn’t play video games, but it didn’t play video games when I bought it either.
My ten year old laptop is an i7 with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and a dedicated graphics chip.
My current laptop has 24 GB RAM and also a 1 TB SSD.
Feels like not much progress.
The one place I see a huge leap is in MacBooks. The capabilities of a 2015 Intel based MBP are laughable when compared to an M4 based 2025 MBP. I use an MBP for my music production and I just cannot make it choke, no matter what I throw at it.
Isn’t that guy actually dead, tho?
The actor? yes.
Yeah too bad, he seemed nice
Black Panther never dies.
i have a quad from like 14-ish years ago working pretty well with ubuntu. not the fastest computer on the planet but really usable.
and what can you do with that single core? probably 1.2 GHz tops, no AVX and AES and others…
I wonder what happened to the 15(?) year old laptop at my mum and dads house…could anything be achieved with that?
Put in a SSD and you’ll be surprised how far it can get you.
My father is still using a 13 year old 14" Dell I gave up 6 years ago. He’s even using it with windows 10, and having a SSD it works almost bearably well. They keyboard broke, and with the laptop not being Win11 compatible, he asked for an upgrade.
I got him a 6 year old Thinkpad, but I’ll install Mint and give him a VM for the few SWs he needs Windows for.
And also put in as much RAM as possible.
Not a bad chance. Worth looking into imo
Surely you could do something with it, but it probably has less power than a current raspberry pi.
You can use it to self host maybe
What DE?
