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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the problem here is the age of the system, but that it was extremely crappy system even at it's time. It's 4 watt pre-Zen AMD CPU running at 1GHz. It's a CPU intended for tablets, and even for that it's bottom of the barrel. Something like i7-4770K from the same year (2013-2014), which I recall being very popular at the time, is over order of magnitude faster. The CPU here is more comparable to CPUs from almost decade prior, the venerable Thinkpad T61 would probably perform better.

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It used to be possible and practical to do real work on much less capable hardware.

Making the difficult stuff possible really should not have made the ordinary easy stuff that we already had so much more difficult.

We used to browse the web with 486s and megabytes of RAM. If all I'm doing is reading a newspaper I shouldn't need giga bytes of RAM.

At the same time, at no point of history of computing has 10 year old PC been as useful and usable as it is today, if the PC was half-decent to begin with

Using 2015 PC in 2025 is far less painful than using 1995 PC in 2005.

My desktop is from 2012, so 13 years old so far, but is still very capable at any task I throw at it. It was originally a high-end workstation, but by 2020 was worth so little that I got it for free from someone moving out of town. Last year, upgrading the CPU to the top of the line part that fit the motherboard socket cost $17 (versus an original MSRP of $2300), and upgrading it to 128GB of RAM cost $40.

When even top-of-the-line older hardware is nearly free, it makes little sense to optimize for bottom-of-the-line older hardware.

It does very well on any modern internet task, as well as playing modern video games with a few-year-old used graphics card.

I feel Sandy Bridge (2011) and Haswell (2013) were major turning points. Haswell is especially significant because it forms baseline for x86-64-v3, which e.g. RHEL and others are migrating towards: https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/01/02/exploring-...

That is also one of the potential problems of pre-Haswell hardware, distros might stop supporting it in near-future

Those netbooks were hot garbage when they came out. I remember trying a bunch of them, and they were all slow and shitty even when they came out. I know a few people who bought various brands, and they basically got put away in a desk and never used. Most of them had such low resolution, you couldn't even see the entirety of the Control Panel dialog boxes in Windows. They could barely play videos without shit chopping up. Web surfing was slow back then. They were horrific.

Netbooks were nifty, quite useful as ssh-terminal thin clients etc.

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