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Comment by ElectricalUnion | Hacker News Reader

> And good luck browsing the web in old PCs. You can use Lynx and the like, but you know what I mean.

Hello electron where everything is a browser :)

Yes, even if your system is lean doesn't mean a lot if the application you're using on top still needs a lot of TFLOPs and GBs of fast RAM.

Trying to use a 2GB 2 thread atom netbook here as a dumb terminal of sorts for other systems - a pain for anything that is not very basic limited remote shell. The closest I got to a "working system with browser" was cheating using mosh + browsh on another computer.

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I have Debian 11 on a 2GB laptop running Xfce and it's very usable. The key is to install a 32-bit distro which can be a bit challenging on 64-bit UEFI systems. I have a dummy 64-bit install just for the bootloader and then installed the 32-bit system alongside it.

Instead of 32-bit i686 consider x32 ABI. It uses 32 bit pointers (good for memory) but has access to all the x64 registers, has SSE2 as a min. requirement, etc. which is great for performance - it's the best of both worlds

If your hardware is not too old. I still have 2 PCs that don't have 64 bit support. They still run Xubuntu 16.04 just fine, but have not upgraded or used them after that when out of support.

Which distro offers x32? (Haven't checked, might be a stupid question...) I understood it was a great idea at the time, but implementation took a while and the world had moved on when it was finally ready.

> Which distro offers x32?

A lot of modern distros are still packaging for i686, but actually installing it might be a bit of a pain. I think your safest bet is to go with an OS like Debian that's sure to offer ample support for older systems, or you could go for broke and run a distro like Gentoo/Arch/NixOS that has package manifests/build instructions for each tool and pray that nothing breaks (spoilers: it will).

So, temper your expectations; 32-bit systems aren't a huge priority nowadays, but I'm certain you could put together a usable config if you choose the right base system. Or just keep the machines as they are, I'm sure Xubuntu still runs fine.

x32 is different from i686

My understanding - backed by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI - is that x32 has seen very little adoption and even Linux upstream has considered removing it. It appears to be available on Gentoo because of course it is, Debian if you jump through hoops (https://wiki.debian.org/X32Port), and some embedded tool chains (I'm not running yocto on my laptop). Are there any other accessible options?

Have you tried any of the VNC class of programs?

It allows a virtual screen solution to other computers, even servers. Effectively a private Zoom session.

Worked already smoothly around 2000 over 33.6 kbit/s modem. And lossless compression!

I often have to think of that when we share terminals over Google Meet these days and it takes tens of seconds until the encoding artifacts of red fonts have faded away so text becomes reable again. 100 times more bandwidth for a worse experience, that must be progress...

> Effectively a private Zoom session.

I just wanted to let you know that this comparison absolutely threw me. Of course you're right, they both let you "screen share" but the way you applied a 2022 metaphor to explain 90s tech made me feel a little weird and old.

I guess nano is kind of like a private google docs.

A typewriter is effectively a keyboard hardwired directly to a printer.

That's the modern case of an electric typewriter. A normal typewriter is a printer with manually actuated print heads for dedicated charcters.

Looks like you haven't heard of typeball and daisy wheel printers.

In any case, we were discussing metaphors, not technical details.

You kids and your new fangled nano.

Back in my day it was pine and pico. We did SMTP both ways. And we liked it!

Actually, it weirds me out that the default editor on most Linuxes now is a pico clone. Some don’t don’t even come with a vi out of box.

I started with emacs in college because I liked LISP. But once I was a sysadmin, I learned vi fast because it was the common denominator between Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, BSD, Linux, etc. and I was in a group that absorbed teams that used all of them. …OK, to be fair, our stuff was BSD :).

My first instinct on a fresh/new to me host is to vi. And even when I type nano, I can’t stop my hands from doing vi and get peeved. Fine ‘apt install vim’ or whatever.

> Actually, it weirds me out that the default editor on most Linuxes now is a pico clone. Some don’t don’t even come with a vi out of box.

It really annoys me, because I learned vi and never learned pico/nano, but now when I e.g. `sudo systemctl edit foo@bar` on a new box I end up in a nano session and have to figure out how to quit and get back in using vi.

I'd take that over being a new Ubuntu user. Using the visudo command and trying to do anything.

That was my experience with Solaris and Linux in the late 90s. It being foreign to me was what got me hooked. You could install pico or learn to use Unix tools.

2 days of frustration followed by Eureka! Repeat.

I still do that process now just with other stuff. (Why is my program doing X? Why the F am I getting a RST?) I think that’s what hooks people that are really into this world.

I do actually understand nano as a default on a “friendly” desktop, Raspberry Pi, etc. targeting new users. I’m just a grumpy old man.

Yup. You don’t want to pass EDITOR or VISUAL through sudo so update-alternatives it is.

It’s weird. I know distros are trying to be friendly to new users. But aren’t we past “new users” now for server OSes?

I’d get it on a Raspberry Pi or whatever, where you’re going after kids.

But really, the learning curve and foreign nature of the tools is what got me hooked on Unix in 1997. That and not getting cryptic error messages from Win NT that I could actually dig all the way down and troubleshoot. >:[

To be fair, there's not much to learn. You only need to know Ctrl-O and Ctrl-X, for which they have a cheat sheet at the bottom.

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