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Linux is amazing on my old Thinkpad

I have an old ThinkPad SL-400 with a Core 2 Duo processor and 4 gigabytes of RAM.

I used to think it was completely useless and it ended up gathering dust for years.

But recently, my sister started learning to code, and I decided to give her this laptop.

So I installed Debian 12 with the KDE desktop, and to my surprise it handles things surprisingly well. I didn’t even feel the need to install something lighter like LXDE or XFCE.

It’s amazing how well it multitasks with only 4 gigabytes of RAM. Just to test its limits, I opened vscode, multiple tabs in Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox all at once (including a YouTube video). I even opened Shotcut and edited a video while the browsers were running. Sure, it’s not the fastest system I’ve ever seen, but it seems impossible to make it hang or freeze.

I’m using the Xanmod kernel and zswap, which might be helping to squeeze out more performance from this machine.

Overall it’s amazing that to see how linux can breathe life into older hardware. I hope more people knew this and could save mony while using the latest software.

mfat OP ,

Yeah my smartphone has 12GB of ram :)

Sephtis-6 ,

I have the same lenovo and it indeed seems impossible what it can do. I installed linux on it so my mother could use it and I was blown away by the performance

mfat OP ,

That’s great. Glad we didn’t get read of them :)

BCsven ,

Same with a 2010-11 samsung. W10 made it totally unusable. linux has it peppy for web, and other office tasks, runs zoom calls as good as my new laptop

henfredemars ,

Consider enabling multigenerational LRU if you want the page reclaim strategy used on Android. It will stretch your RAM even more ridiculously far.

You’ve got the compression. That’s great. Now, you can be more intelligent about which pages to compress also.

mfat OP ,

Thanks just skimmed through the documentation and it seems very interesting.

johan , (edited )
@johan@feddit.nl avatar

That’s great! Glad it’s working out.

One thing made me chuckle though:

with only 4 gigabytes of RAM

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads of RAM?

henfredemars ,

It’s an inconceivably large amount of memory and also nothing. It really depends on your perspective.

Gaming PC? Doesn’t even qualify because we need the space for those graphics. A wireless router? Huge. Definitely overkill.

Memory is pretty cheap these days but what constitutes a large amount of it depends on the job. Because I mainly do embedded development where memory is measured in 4k pages most everything seems like a lot.

fratermus ,
@fratermus@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads or RAM?

First stick I bought was 1MB of SIPP, used, for $50.

“When I was a boy we had to load HIMEM and EMM386 uphill in the snow”

hiddengoat ,

HIMEM? What newfangled shit is that?

Really though, I do NOT miss the days of having a custom boot disk for every single game.

this_is_router ,
@this_is_router@feddit.de avatar

we had a paper with a bunch of Ys and Ns, so we could go through the autoexec.bat and config.sys step by step and decide which library to load into highmem or lowmem

rotopenguin ,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

My first was a 512KB sidecar.

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

I remember when my big Christmas present was an extra 16MB of RAM

GustavoM ,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

It used to be a lot back then. Right now? Not really.

t. Got a Orange pi zero 3 w/ 1 GiB of ram and the performance is really great.

clutch ,

4Gb is not much under Windows 11 and running Chrome

MyNameIsRichard , (edited )
@MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml avatar

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads of RAM?

I remember upgrading my Atari STe to 4MB (yes MB) of RAM and thinking “I’ll never use that much”. Now I have 32GB.

roo ,
@roo@lemmy.one avatar

I had the same outcome with my HP 2 in 1, with one minor problem. I have to log in via keyboard because there’s no virtual keyboard option for the log in with the Fedora distro I used.

mfat OP ,

Could you install one from the repos?

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