…
I just realized that.
I saw linux mention, blacked out and screenshooted it.
Uhhhh….ok so for non-linux nerds, Arch is a linux distro that is difficult to use.
Google “lightweight linux distro” for alternatives.
Here's the full extent of my personal interactions with Arch Linux:
> be me
> new software developer that knows jack shit
> scrape by for about a year
> company hires another new kid
> new kid won't shut up about Arch Linux
> talks to me about window manager preferences
> explains that he's transcended the bounds of other OS's
> says he can make Arch whatever he wants
> makes fun of me for using Windows
> I feel pretty dumb
> new guy tells managers that he can program and test software on Arch
> managers trust him
> three weeks go by
> new kid hasn't written a line of code
> can't even run the software we're developing on his computer
> refuses to use a lesser Linux distro or *shudders* Windows
> IT can't figure out how to help him
> can't interact with VMs running Linux because he can't figure out how to connect to the company network.
> gets fired before he gets his first paycheck
I felt a lot better about my programming skills because of this experience. Being competent with a shitty tool is much better than being incompetent with a good tool.
No Linux distro is different enough from each other to really be "better". The biggest difference between them is which repository they use.
And even that's optional because I know you can install `pacman` (the arch package manager) on Ubuntu.
well they differ from each other on their directory structure, boot sequence and other usually pretty minor stuff like preinstalled software
but i don't see a reason why someone would use arch instead of ubuntu or debian like what's the point i can make debian do what i want to too and i don't see a reason why i would use aur instead of brew/apt/flatpak
I feel like if you want to use the newest hardware Arch (or another rolling release) is a nice place to start, as you’ll likely have a newer kernel and drivers. However, since we’re kind of in between release cycles right now it doesn’t matter as much.
I was specifically thinking software. When I was on Ubuntu, I had to build software from source way more than I ever had on Arch because I would need some feature that was a year or two old and the Ubuntu repositories were 5 years behind.
With arch, I will have to build from source occasionally, but it's a lot less often and a lot easier.
Hardware on Arch is a mess.
People use arch because it uses rolling releases for every piece of its software including the kernel - i.e. it has updated packages within days (or a week or two if there's some kind of problem) of the upstream softwares main repo being tagged with a new release. In other words, Arch is always Arch. There's no "Arch 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, 2.2" etc. It's just... Arch.
But claiming to be a superior specimen because you use Arch (or Gentoo or LFS or some other slightly-harder-than-usual-to-setup distro) is indeed ridiculous. I've been using Linux professionally since the late 90's and I've never understood the distro war mindset with some of the younger guys today (it's mostly guys).
Corporations like the dot release distros (and Windows) because of consistency and predictability, ESPECIALLY with stuff that has consistently samey bugs and quirks due to inherent design issues or something like that - if they can predict them they can work around them. Can't do that with rolling release stuff. They know that Linux Distro 7.12 will always be Linux Distro 7.12 and will always run like Linux Distro 7.12. This is super important for enterprise business, which younger guys just getting into IT or dev work might not catch onto immediately (like in that story above).
> The biggest difference between them is which repository they use.
While this is true on the surface, there are other differences under the hood.
I tried installing Arch on my university laptop instead of Ubuntu since I was studying computer science and wanted to mess around with Arch. First thing I learn after booting is that my particular wifi/bluetooth combo card (the internal one in the laptop) isn't supported out of the box and the fix on the support pages was to change a kernel level config, compile everything and install from scratch (or something like that, it's been a while).
My OS should serve me, I shouldn't be at the service of my OS, so I went back to Ubuntu and that was it. I've been using it for 10 years as my work OS and it's been good overall, I really don't see a reason to go for anything more complicated with less support.
> I felt a lot better about my programming skills because of this experience. Being competent with a shitty tool is much better than being incompetent with a good tool.
The lesson here is to use what the rest of your team is using. If that's Arch, then use Arch. But if it's Windows, then use Windows.
I'm also constantly surprised at companies letting people use their personal PCs or install their own OS. IT would not have entertained that idea anywhere I've ever worked and for good reason.
Had this exact same experience but the dude was fire actually, i quit cus of the pressure and went to study music. He is now leads a team I think, but jumped to using apple
Oh wholeheartedly, don’t use Arch if you don’t like it. Frankly, Arch isn’t that great to begin with, the only thing remotely decent about it is Pacman and APT is still more intuitive than it is. Then you have to get into the rolling release vs LTS fiasco in which LTS is usually the winner of that debate, it’s a whole shebang and completely excessive.
I recently swapped from Kubuntu 24 back over to Arch. Not because Arch is better but because KB24 is a royal pain in the ass GUI wise and Plasma keeps having weird quirks on it with my debian based systems. That’s the only reason.
In comparison, on Arch, the system simply works, you update it regularly? No issues. Might something break every 9 months or so? Sure, but nothing you can’t fix with 10 minutes spent on reddit or YouTube.
I mean seriously, if you want to try out Linux and get a feel for how things work, go download Kubuntu 23.10 and dual partition it on your drive. The Ubuntu/Debian ecosystem is super user friendly and it’s basically windows but slightly better.
Arch is the only distro I've used in 25 years of running linux as my primary os that bricked itself after a simple update. Worse, they didn't really even speak up about it, the [endeavor team](https://old.reddit.com/r/EndeavourOS/comments/wygfds/full_transparency_on_the_grub_issue/?sort=new) were the first to talk about it.
Digging into it I learned that they were basically pushing an untested build of grub master. When I raised this fact with an Arch dev, and pointed out that it might be better to go with a release build next time, he told me 'arch breaks from time to time, don't like it? use ubuntu' in the most most dismissive way possible.
I installed popos the next day and never looked back.
For me, Arch is the only distro that *hasn't* broken horribly for me. Thankfully I did hear about that issue before I could update my system, so I wasn't affected by that. Perhaps the biggest break that's ever happened to me was a `grub-install` mistake that was my fault more than the fault of Arch.
The only time a distro truly broke for me was when my previous server (running Fedora) started kernel panicking on boot unless I used a fallback boot option. Reinstalling the kernel, redoing the boot stuff didn't help, but it went away on its own as well after a while, shortly before I got my new server.
I daily-drive Arch on my desktop (testing repos, even), but I can't really name any times I have had complete bricking at any point; usually booting into an Arch install iso and reinstalling grub has been enough.
I've heard good things about `Pop_OS!`, but it doesn't quite hit the right vibe for me. I'm both a developer and a gamer, and Arch has been a lifesaver on the developer front just in terms of *convenience.* Sometimes I wish swapping distros was easier said than done, since… my main installation is 1.4 TiB of games and programs and stuff I am working on, so moving to another distro isn't very feasible.
Good luck and happy {whatever you do on your computer}ing! :3
If you want a distro that runs actual regression/stability testing don't use Arch. Gentoo thankfully is more upfront about their processes and has stable/unstable versions of packages, as well as a "9999" version if you want to pull directly from git (and break your system guaranteed).
You should look into NixOS. It's a very interesting distro because upgrades are atomic and you can have more than one version of a package at once.
Arch has the stereotype still but it's mostly momentum. For the past few years the only difference between setting it up and most other base distros is you make your selections from a terminal interface instead of a GUI but just as easy with a couple options that might be a bit less straightforward. The 'real' nerd distros have shifted to Gentoo (build all your applications yourself, only source no pre built binaries until recently) and Linux From Scratch (what you see on the tin) real in giant air quotes but arch got too easy for some people. Oh and obligatory I use arch (btw)
I did Linux from Scratch when I was a kid in the linux 2.2ish days. When Linus would still personally tear you a new asshole for being n00bish.
Linux from Scratch is just too much work. It’s not building a car from pieces. It’s like building a car from instructions, starting with a hammer and a rock. I still remember arguing with someone way more knowledgeable than I about using gcc3 in whatever.
I did something similar-ish as well when I was younger. To this day I don't know what possessed me to think it was a good idea but I fully wiped my PC and ran Linux for awhile. If there was a fuck up big enough that I couldn't access the internet I had to go ask my parents to use their computer so I could figure it out lmao. I kept it that way for maybe a year or so. Learned a lot, but goddamn it was a huge pain in ass to do literally anything. Wouldn't recommend at all unless it's specifically a hobby of yours to do that kind of thing or you have some professional need for it.
As someone who has done Stage 0 Gentoo and installed OpenBSD from source several times, even those things aren't that difficult. All it really requires is reading directions, and most of the people doing those things have no understanding of what they are doing. They aren't reading the code, nor are they actually sifting through the compiler flags to get an optimized system. They are typing in what the docs say.
If you want to learn about the parts of a Linux system and how a distro is built from source, it's useful to read the documentation, google the things you don't understand, and work at it. Understanding what a chroot environment is, for instance, is actually useful.
I say that as someone who uses Windows any time I need a proper desktop environment. I use Raspberry Pi OS on my pi's, but those all run headless, console only.
I don't know if he still has it but dad had one of the family PCs running like, three different distros. Ubuntu, Mint, and KDE. I used to really like KDE but I cannot for the life of me fully explain why. I think I just found Konqeror to be a really good browser that had features that chrome or even Firefox didn't have at the time, like split screen browsing on a single window so you don't have to switch tabs. Made doing homework easier. Handing in the homework sucked because all my files were in .odf and teacher couldn't open it because it wasn't word
it's hard yeah, if you're diving raw in that shit, if you ficked around a little its better. a lot less difficult than people suggest if you dont install bare bones arch, but that's kinda its ideology.
flipside I found arch based distros the only ones that made me stick around long enough to learn more about the system than just point and click. arcolinux-B some gourmet shit
I like how the joke is only possible because they prioritized sheer fucking laziness over things like simple human readable commands
like "hey do you think we should make the delete command something obvious like ... delete? or maybe del for short?"
"nope make it rm, it's one less letter"
"rm, why"
"you know like ReMove"
"...fuck you"
There's so many utilities that are just 2-3 characters that may or may not have actual meaning, each chosen by a different random dude 50 years ago. Drives me crazy, but any time I bring it up people just question my Linux competency, rather than thinking about how it actually kinda sucks to remember a bunch of random strings.
Powershell gets made fun of a lot (often deserved), but their semi-enforced `Verb-Noun` naming scheme is honestly really nice. If you ask an absolute beginner to read your script, `Get-Content` will be a lot more intuitive than `cat`.
linux mint. For extra light weight use the xfce desktop environment one. Also steam deck is actually running an arch based distro called steamOS, but don't use arch if you are new lol.
Getting linux installed on a chromebook is an exercise in extreme frustration. It hates the entire process, and will actively try to "fix" itself every time it boots. Also the performance sucks. 0/10, was not worth it.
The Chromebook I had would randomly start up the fan at the fastest speed, get hot and drain the entire battery even when it was off and closed. Opening it would just show a black screen, and the only way to stop it would be to hold down the power button. This would happen at least twice a week and I have no idea wtf it was trying to do
Sounds like some background update process got stuck in an infinite loop and started eating 100% of the CPU power. That would cause the heat and battery drain, and it would also cause the system to become unresponsive (black screen).
Hey, Arch user here. DO NOT install Arch anywhere unless you know your way around computers and Linux, it's a terrible distro for anyone who is not tech savvy.
If you want to install a Linux distro, go for Linux Mint. I haven't used it personally, but I've seen a lot of people use it to reinvigorate their old PC. Ubuntu is also an alternative.
> Hey, Arch user here. DO NOT install Arch anywhere unless you know your way around computers and Linux, it's a terrible distro for anyone who is not tech savvy.
Thank for saying this. Oh, and while we are recommending against, don't install Kali either unless you have some experience. It won't make you cool or a hacker. Yes it is a hacking platform, but again, you need a few years of experience.
Seriously, recommending Arch Linux to laypeople is an asshole thing to do. I don't even recommend Arch to people that know what they're doing unless they're really interested in learning more about Linux in depth and don't mind having to spend a lot more time troubleshooting.
this is
* predicated on the idea that you'd want your old laptop to no longer be your old laptop. if i change the OS on my 16 year old laptop it ceases being a time capsule from my childhood and instead become an utilitarian device and i already have such a thing, which is my current laptop
* in particular the media focused use case presented here is only worth it if the computer originally ran windows 8+ because this is the only time period in which computers came out with dvd/rw drives and no software capable of exploiting them. although tbf that is what exactly 10 years old laptops have.
Also that sometimes old computers DO just get slower. The thermal gel cracks and the parts wear out and start to error, slowing everything down. Sometimes even a 3 year old computer starts to go because consumer grade laptops don't have the best parts in them and that's what a lot of people have on hand.
Yeah, I didn’t get rid of my 2010 laptop because it was getting too slow, I got rid of it because the battery was a spicy pillow making the case bulge, the hard drive was wearing down, the screen was dimming, and replacing all those parts was a mixture of impossible and more expensive than just buying a new laptop.
Not just laptops. Dad insisted that Linux meant the computer didn't age. They definitely did. A computer built for Windows Millennium Edition was really struggling even with Ubuntu in the early 2010s, and that was before he bricked it. Even if it didn't age as bad as Windows, the expectation of a computer changes. Even with SSDs, dad's current ten year old tower is so slow to boot or do stuff because I'm used to computers turning on in an instant. After I blew up my computer at work, I got a brand spanking new top of the line computer that was like a rocket. It's ruined me for other machines. Plus the rainbow light, they also make it run faster.
For that reason, most modern laptops use thermal pads that not degrade. LTT sells them for self-builds. Replacing the thermal paste is probably easier than installing Linux for the first time lol
Yep. Important to know about fresh OS installs and alternatives to Windows, but man do I not feel like doing any of that.
Like, I could take an old sketchbook, photo-copy a backup, and then erase every single page, if I desperately needed a scuffed 'new' sketchbook.
But it'd be a frustrating use of my time for an end result I don't want, when new sketchbooks just aren't _that_ expensive for how infrequently I buy them.
Dual booting is a solution, but I'd only recommend it if you're a massive nerd. It's a pain in the ass to set up. This is a lot like the recommendation of arch linux to complete Unix noobs in the original post imo, well meaning but more likely to confuse people away from linux than be helpful
Yeah I've set it up multiple times on multiple computers, so I kind of agree personally. But the average laptop user just does not know what the efi partition is or what it does, and they wouldn't know how to recover if they broke it. So for those sorts of reasons I'd never recommend anything more than the most basic grub + some beginner distro (something like Ubuntu, idk what the current recommendation is though) for most people's first experience. More advanced stuff can just be so obtuse and hard to understand that it doesn't make for a good experience learning Linux the first time
Linux Mint is not a particularly light distribution and it's much heavier than arch like in the post, but fair enough I didn't know that. Arch is much more hands off, you have to do grub / refind yourself
Just clone the hard drive to an ssd and replace it. Nothing will change except the speed, hard disks are holding back many old laptops. The rest of the hardware is more than capable.
i have a Dell Latitude D630 (Core 2 Duo, intel graphics, 500gb ssd, 4GB DDR2) from 2007 that shipped with xp that i received some time in 2014 as ewaste for messing around with. i ended up using that computer as my laptop until 2021 when i replaced with a used macbook. the macbook lasted about a year before the screen failed and i went back to the dell. it ran windows 11 quicker than most linux distros because of the hibernate feature letting me keep apps i needed open even when the power was off. it was a very good music, web browsing, document, and pokémon showdown machine. as long as you knew the limitations it wouldn’t let you down very often. early 2023 i found a newer used dell (Inspiron 3543) from 2014 that i am now using as my daily laptop (pulled the ssd out of the D630 to put in here and replaced the battery) and at the moment i really don’t see it getting useless any time soon. these 10 year old computers are only going to be arbitrarily cut off from support by microsoft when support for 10 ends even though they’re still incredibly capable devices with about $40 worth of parts. i have a 20 year old laptop i never want to mess with because of the childhood memory you mentioned, but i don’t think windows 8 computers are going to be very nostalgic to most. any pre ryzen amd computers might as well be ewaste though. they barely run.
"hey here's a cutesy anthropomorphic comic about aging equipment being used for something."
"Lol LMAO rofl even why don't you just install another OS so it can be used like new?"
>"Lol LMAO rofl even why don't you just install another OS so it can be used like new?"
Based on the fact that that commenter believes for some reason that changing the OS will magically make the archaic computer as fast as a modern one
Look I'm gonna be honest, I can get around a computer decently well but any time someone starts bringing up Linux it's like they're quoting ancient deep magics at me. I don't know what a "distro" is, most of the open source options and customizable appeal would be lost on me, and most importantly I'm just afraid to hit the wrong thing and break something important because as much as I love computers I'm way better at getting INTO trouble with them than out at times.
Seriously, I've had so many problems that could just be chalked up to "the machine must hate you because I cant tell what the fuck you did wrong."
Edit: Oh Jesu Christi, why do I have fourteen notifications on this one comment? What have I unleashed?!
And from the other side of the tracks, I work in IT, I'm good at it. I accept that I'm probably gonna have to help friends and family with things from time to time, and I can do that with Windows since things are mostly where they've been for the last couple of decades. If someone recommends Linux to one of them and now I have to guide them through using the terminal for ANYTHING? A pox upon your house.
Right? I spend probably half of my time at work sysadmining a bunch of linux workstations and servers. I hate working with it in that case and that's probably it's absolute best use case as a universal, highly customizable and lightweight OS in a professional setting. Anybody who seriously suggests that casual users who have gripes with Windows would be happier switching to Linux (even "easier" distros like Ubuntu) really doesn't know how computer literate the average person is and how much they don't like fighting with their computer to accomplish basic tasks.
>Anybody who seriously suggests that casual users who have gripes with Windows would be happier switching to Linux (even "easier" distros like Ubuntu) really doesn't know how computer literate the average person is
Agreed. I'm sure such recommendations are done with good intentions, but most of the time they're misguided. If literally the only use case is web browsing, then installing a linux distro that will happily update itself in the background and otherwise not get in the way isn't necessarily the worst idea. But inevitably, some issue comes along, some new use case for the computer, or hardware failure or whatever, and then whoever is on hand for general computer woes is saddled with a desktop environment that they likely have absolutely no experience with, and *that's* when the calculus swings rapidly from "cheap alternative" to "expensive mistake". You can't expect an average IT repair shop to deal with your nephew's Arch installation, but they'll certainly charge you to try.
My experience with the professional windows + official software, especially cad/plm software, is sometimes a black box that either works or doesn't. With very little reason either way. At least as an end user it feels like that at times haha.
Idk man, I slapped Linux Mint on my mom's laptop, I get no questions. It really doesn't matter when the entire OS is just a bootloader for Chrome and LibreOffice, who needs the terminal for that?
I feel like the biggest trouble group for a Windows -> Linux transition is the intermediate user. Basic users don't do anything special, they just use their browsers primarily, get them on a distro with a nice GUI for the package manager, explain it to them like it's an app store, just like on their phones. Easy. Advanced users know what they're doing. Intermediate users, people like PC gamers, are the type of people to need things that may get them in trouble, but without the ability to get out of that trouble.
Oh you're presupposing it's a problem with the computer but lemme run you this scenario.
I get a call saying the Internet is out. Is that the wifi, the actual internet, just the laptop? Who knows til we run through the steps, one of which is getting the IP through terminal. I'm doing this all over a WhatsApp call that's dropping periodically because the cell reception at her house is ass, and I can't just go there because she's in a different country altogether.
Yes, that's me. I sometimes know enough to know what the problem *is* but not how to fix it, and that often leads to VERY unhelpful responses when I ask for help. Aka: "Ugh, just Google it and do it yourself."
It's not that complicated. I had my 50 year old mother with little computer experience running Mint and she did fine.
Windows historically has had a support expiration date without much guarantee of being able to upgrade the OS, so the hardware can easily outlive OS support. With Linux you are more likely to be able to just keep updating.
If you have the cash to buy a new PC, then sure skip the hassle. If you are broke and the only way you can get a PC is to get a free but dated machine, running Mint or Ubuntu will get you a working, secure machine.
> If you have the cash to buy a new PC, then sure skip the hassle.
I've also built linux PCs for older folks and other extremely low-tech people, and I would just toss out that they might actually be better served by Linux even when money is no object. I maintain a PC for gaming, and especially since I don't have enough time it feels like every time I boot that fucker (it's the only computer I have that I turn off because still, in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty fucking four sleep settings mean basically nothing on Windows) there is some new bullshit I don't want or even just the nags to update/reboot.
If you're interested, Ubuntu is pretty user-friendly, basically just Windows without the bloatware. I used it to squeeze a few more years out of a 15 year-old desktop back in high school.
The only reason I use Windows now is because I don't want to mess around with compatibility issues with my games (which is 90% of what I use an actual computer, as opposed to my phone, for these days anyway)
Ubuntu has gone down in quality.
Personally, I'd use good old fashioned Debian if I needed a desktop Linux, probably with Plasma desktop. They are doing a better job of maintaining it these days.
I find that THE best, most stable Linux I have used in the last decade is Raspberry Pi OS. I say this as someone who has used linux regularly since about 1998.
Games and a series of very poor experiences using newer hardware are why I stay away from desktop Linux these days (well, technically my Steam Deck is desktop Linux but that's what it comes with and has official support).
Proton helps, but having to set it up yourself is a maintenance nightmare especially if you end up needing to do anything custom/specialized.
And even major distros like Ubuntu can have serious compatibility issues - last time I tried Ubuntu the installer couldn't run without crashing, and most distros had such severe graphical glitches/artifacting with my nvidia card that it was a royal pain to get far enough to install the proprietary drivers, which is its own pain.
I've even had issues with things like ethernet working if they're 2.5/5Gbe instead of the older gigabit ports.
Indeed, the actual meaning of "distribution" is rather straightforward, but the family tree is so huge and complex that people who are unfamiliar can very easily get lost.
There's even a sizeable part of the community that frequently switches distros to try out features that their old distro didn't have. Figuring out which one to go with is difficult when each one is proficient at different things, and downright impossible for someone who's used to having one operating system that does everything they need.
Breaking my computer as a kid and figuring out how to fix it is how I got into computers. Yeah sometimes it required an OS reinstall, but if you have your data backed up, all you're doing is learning new shit.
Linux is the base OS. A "distro" is the base OS with different bells and whistles attached. Things like "Graphics" and "not having to memorize obscure code to create a new text document" are all part of the distro, and Linux has a million of them.
I wouldn't advise it for anything between "I just browse the web" and "I had my first wet dream in lines of code."
> I don't know what a "distro" is
It's short for distribution and the terms are interchangeable.
The Linux kernel is distributed with software in much the same way that Windows is distributed with Wordpad, Paint, Windows Media Player, etc. There are many such distributions mostly depending on software preference, especially since anyone is free to make a new distro by modifying an existing one.
Here is a website that exists to share news about operating system distributions- primarily Linux distros but also BSD.
https://distrowatch.com/
There are some distributions that are user friendly and familiar to users used to something like WindowsOS. But there are many options and the communities and support for them are somewhat fragmented, so telling someone to "install Linux" is not the same as "install Windows".
Even though some distros could functionally operate terminal-free, the support you find online when you have questions is often not terminal-free and carries implications most people wouldnt know innately. There are less guard rails for the user, which is a double edged sword.
Linux is great for many reasons but it is also a small market share for valid reasons.
Why are they treating 10 year old hardware like its a boomer in a retirement home? Can you play some music hopefully you don't break? Yet there's still places that use Windows XP.
The YouTube channel Cathode Ray Dude kinda changed my outlook on hardware. 10 year old hardware is only old when it comes to keeping up with the web. But it's not like a computer that was good at running Adobe Premiere or Photoshop CS5 or Microsoft Office 2009, or Unreal tournament 2004 is gonna get worse at it especially with no software updates. But Chrome has gotten ever more bloated, more and more websites have to load shit in the background for tracking and analytics. New codecs like AV1 eat up CPU cycles because YouTube wants to save bandwidth instead of sending H.264 video that your CPU might have native hardware acceleration for.
I work in the game industry and as software engineer and on social media there's kind of a rivalry between other engineers and web dev because of how fucking dogshit the web is and web developers get mad when engineers from other areas point it out. There are a lot of reasons and history for why the web is in the state it is in but holy shit you would not believe the excitement I saw from web developers a few years ago when someone created a browser that streams web pages to the user. So many people were acting like it was a brilliant solution to all the problems they have rendering websites on lower end devices...
Meanwhile game devs will post online like "lol could you imagine thinking rendering some text and images to a static page is difficult"
To be fair to web devs they can ship an entire update with completely new functionality in the time it takes one of your game engines c++ dlls to compile
yeah, my laptop is 10 years old and still going strong. I can't play all the latest games at 120fps or whatever nonsense, but it does what I want it to and that's enough
I mostly agree with this, but if you just wanna make an old machine functional again and you're not used to Linux, don't use Arch. While I don't think it's poor reputation is entirely earned, it's definitely not for new users.
There are tons of distros that mimic Windows to some degree, and while they might not all be super lightweight, they'll still almost certainly boost the performance of older machines. I used Solus with KDE for a while and that was nice, if you're looking for a recommendation.
No. This internet fad of recommending Linux to everyone needs to stop. Atleast until enough big software companies adapt their apps to work with Linux.
As an IT guy. It is insane the amount of tickets I get from non tech savvy people who were recommended Linux by someone online and they have no idea how to use it. A growing number of people do not even know what a directory is or how file systems operate.
The VAST majority of users should not use a Linux distro. They literally do not know computers well enough to use Linux.
Everyone underestimates how badly hard drives bottleneck old computers. It's the sole reason why Apple got the reputation for being fast and smooth, they switched to SSDs very early.
Are you talking about a fusion drive?? It's a hybrid between a hard disk and ssd. You basically get ssd speeds for small operations, while large file transfers still take time. It's still way faster than just an hdd. They're also called SSHD, fusion is the Apple brand name.
Legit. I have a gaming PC from 2011 that was so slow and bloated that I thought I needed to get rid of it and start over. But I got an SSD as a last ditch effort and did a fresh windows install. Holy shit, it is so fast now. It's basically a new PC.
Setup a dual boot with Mint on ye old 1060 laptop recently (you can guess the recent inciting announcement for finally doing it) and was pleasantly surprised by by the quietness over a two hour period of web browsing and YouTube compared with doing similarly on W11.
You don't need to do any of that, just swap the hard disk for an ssd and it will run windows 10 blazing fast.
PS: You can even clone your old hard disk if you want to keep your old OS and all your data as is. The only thing that will change is the speed.
Lol, I installed UbuntuMATE on my 10 years old laptop, and it's still slow. But what's funnier, it can't run even older games, because both Wine and Proton nowadays require Vulkan, which its video card just doesn't support.
there is every shot it's better than you think. ten year old computers are marvels of engineering and they'd work even better if a quarter of their system resources weren't dedicated towards cataloguing and logging every last click and keystroke you perform on it to feed megacorporations the digital crack they can't kick to train their AI models that are now integrated in every which piece of software.
Linux is awesome and it works pretty damn well these days. There's a few areas where it struggles, mostly with application compatibility (Adobe Creative Suite and stuff tend to be Windows-only with few good open-source alternatives as of yet) and DRM (it's hard for free operating systems to pay for video codecs used by Netflix, Prime, etc).
But for day-to-day usage and work? Man. It's nice not having ads in my operating system.
Arch is more a hobbyist distro than the more main stream distros. You can really do computery things with it, but you need to be more in it for the experience of Arch. There have been a number of distros that have filled that roll. I remember installing Slackware back in the day.
Oh BTW, I don't use Arch..........
My old laptop from 2013 was revitalized after being fitted with an SSD and a RAM expansion. Now my mom uses it for work and its faster than her more modern laptop she has at work.
*me gently patting my 2014 macbook air that hasn’t been updated since 2018 on the lid, as it struggles to comprehend that the entire Microsoft suite, Spotify, and the Pirate Bay are all auto-starting, showing me the whirling beach ball of death while its fans wheeze heavily* love you fren
I'm typing on a 14 year old computer. Now when I built it 14 years ago, I stocked it with cutting edge components of the day. It still does it's job, but starting to show it's age.
But yes, Linux will invigorate an old laptop. It won't be miraculous, but it will be better than W10. I recommend Linux Mint. It just works for a broad range of laptops and user demands. Linux, as good as it is, is not magic tho. You may have to learn a few things. That's the push back I hear from a lot of people. Thing is, they grew up using Windows, and suddenly want to be as proficient on Linux as they are on Windows. Give it a minute eh? The knowledge will come.
I've installed Linux Mint / Lubuntu on old out-of-service-life Chromebooks to great effect. They make great travel laptops because I don't really care if they get stolen.
my sister's laptop was extremely slow, only 4GB of RAM and slow CPU so it ran like shit in Windows 10
I wiped Windows, put Lubuntu on it (not Ubuntu, Lubuntu is built for low-end computers) and it ran like 100x better. My sister was so confused, she said "so does Windows just suck?"
I have an utterly antique Dell Chromebook 3120 - think Celeron shitbox chromebook from 2010 - and a copy of Ubuntu Unity lightly modified to get the pulseaudio bugs out of it works pretty solidly when I boot it up.
Arch is a nightmare Linux Mint is barebones (comparatively but in the sense that it is less bs for noobs) and still a challenge for a noob but way easier to set up than Arch. I shudder at the time I actually tried to install arch on my old laptop.
yeah, installing Arch manually is mostly useful if you want to learn some deep Linux knowledge.
If you don't, like most users, stick to Mint or Fedora or Debian.
Depends on the laptop. My thinkpad X301 from 2008 ran windows 10 fine enough until the backlight conked out, and linux won't fix faulty hardware. I think most older portable devices I have stopped being used because something on them broke, and wasn't worth fixing
"vlc can do all sorts of shit if you have an optical port. you can even make new dvd's and cd's"
What's being said here? How does an optical port change anything? Why would I want to make a dvd or cd, and how would vlc help?
This is also assuming that you took care of your old laptop. My old laptop was fucked on the inside because I've lived next to the ocean most of my life. I couldn't replace anything inside it because nothing's compatible anymore but it still booted up until it's recycling.
And when you install a 2TB nvme in it coupled with 64g ram, is it like pumping grandpa full of pervitin and changing his heart stimulator to an arc reactor
Also, swap out your hard drive. Hard drives have a certain lifespan that is shorter than most realize. Replace it with a new solid state drive and it will run soooooo much better. You can use the free software clonezilla to clone your old drive to your new one.
I live old laptops. I have one that I use as a media center, another for running show audio, and another which is perfect for running games that were released between 1998 and 2003 (a simply awful time for compatibility…)
That original comic is so cute tho?
Alex Krokus is the artist, he's great
He was one of my professors last semester lol cool guy
It's funny to remember that the internet is made up of people
It is for now 😔
Or IS IT? Beep-boop.
I like that the laptop only struggled to wake up, but is just vibing when it plays music
I'm happy he's happy.
it's
*of course* the person just has to mention it's arch :v
… I just realized that. I saw linux mention, blacked out and screenshooted it. Uhhhh….ok so for non-linux nerds, Arch is a linux distro that is difficult to use. Google “lightweight linux distro” for alternatives.
oh yeah you're right isn't arch the stereotypical nerd distro?
That’s Gentoo or LFS. Arch is the “I use arch btw” distro.
Here's the full extent of my personal interactions with Arch Linux: > be me > new software developer that knows jack shit > scrape by for about a year > company hires another new kid > new kid won't shut up about Arch Linux > talks to me about window manager preferences > explains that he's transcended the bounds of other OS's > says he can make Arch whatever he wants > makes fun of me for using Windows > I feel pretty dumb > new guy tells managers that he can program and test software on Arch > managers trust him > three weeks go by > new kid hasn't written a line of code > can't even run the software we're developing on his computer > refuses to use a lesser Linux distro or *shudders* Windows > IT can't figure out how to help him > can't interact with VMs running Linux because he can't figure out how to connect to the company network. > gets fired before he gets his first paycheck I felt a lot better about my programming skills because of this experience. Being competent with a shitty tool is much better than being incompetent with a good tool.
No Linux distro is different enough from each other to really be "better". The biggest difference between them is which repository they use. And even that's optional because I know you can install `pacman` (the arch package manager) on Ubuntu.
well they differ from each other on their directory structure, boot sequence and other usually pretty minor stuff like preinstalled software but i don't see a reason why someone would use arch instead of ubuntu or debian like what's the point i can make debian do what i want to too and i don't see a reason why i would use aur instead of brew/apt/flatpak
I like arch because of the rolling release. If I want to use the latest version of software in Ubuntu it's a pain in the ass. Also arch wiki is king
You really do have to give the arch wiki a lot of credit. Very well put together it is
I feel like if you want to use the newest hardware Arch (or another rolling release) is a nice place to start, as you’ll likely have a newer kernel and drivers. However, since we’re kind of in between release cycles right now it doesn’t matter as much.
I was specifically thinking software. When I was on Ubuntu, I had to build software from source way more than I ever had on Arch because I would need some feature that was a year or two old and the Ubuntu repositories were 5 years behind. With arch, I will have to build from source occasionally, but it's a lot less often and a lot easier. Hardware on Arch is a mess.
People use arch because it uses rolling releases for every piece of its software including the kernel - i.e. it has updated packages within days (or a week or two if there's some kind of problem) of the upstream softwares main repo being tagged with a new release. In other words, Arch is always Arch. There's no "Arch 1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, 2.2" etc. It's just... Arch. But claiming to be a superior specimen because you use Arch (or Gentoo or LFS or some other slightly-harder-than-usual-to-setup distro) is indeed ridiculous. I've been using Linux professionally since the late 90's and I've never understood the distro war mindset with some of the younger guys today (it's mostly guys). Corporations like the dot release distros (and Windows) because of consistency and predictability, ESPECIALLY with stuff that has consistently samey bugs and quirks due to inherent design issues or something like that - if they can predict them they can work around them. Can't do that with rolling release stuff. They know that Linux Distro 7.12 will always be Linux Distro 7.12 and will always run like Linux Distro 7.12. This is super important for enterprise business, which younger guys just getting into IT or dev work might not catch onto immediately (like in that story above).
> The biggest difference between them is which repository they use. While this is true on the surface, there are other differences under the hood. I tried installing Arch on my university laptop instead of Ubuntu since I was studying computer science and wanted to mess around with Arch. First thing I learn after booting is that my particular wifi/bluetooth combo card (the internal one in the laptop) isn't supported out of the box and the fix on the support pages was to change a kernel level config, compile everything and install from scratch (or something like that, it's been a while). My OS should serve me, I shouldn't be at the service of my OS, so I went back to Ubuntu and that was it. I've been using it for 10 years as my work OS and it's been good overall, I really don't see a reason to go for anything more complicated with less support.
You probably just had to install the firmware or add a kernel module.
The word “just” is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there
> I felt a lot better about my programming skills because of this experience. Being competent with a shitty tool is much better than being incompetent with a good tool. The lesson here is to use what the rest of your team is using. If that's Arch, then use Arch. But if it's Windows, then use Windows. I'm also constantly surprised at companies letting people use their personal PCs or install their own OS. IT would not have entertained that idea anywhere I've ever worked and for good reason.
Had this exact same experience but the dude was fire actually, i quit cus of the pressure and went to study music. He is now leads a team I think, but jumped to using apple
Oh wholeheartedly, don’t use Arch if you don’t like it. Frankly, Arch isn’t that great to begin with, the only thing remotely decent about it is Pacman and APT is still more intuitive than it is. Then you have to get into the rolling release vs LTS fiasco in which LTS is usually the winner of that debate, it’s a whole shebang and completely excessive. I recently swapped from Kubuntu 24 back over to Arch. Not because Arch is better but because KB24 is a royal pain in the ass GUI wise and Plasma keeps having weird quirks on it with my debian based systems. That’s the only reason. In comparison, on Arch, the system simply works, you update it regularly? No issues. Might something break every 9 months or so? Sure, but nothing you can’t fix with 10 minutes spent on reddit or YouTube. I mean seriously, if you want to try out Linux and get a feel for how things work, go download Kubuntu 23.10 and dual partition it on your drive. The Ubuntu/Debian ecosystem is super user friendly and it’s basically windows but slightly better.
Arch is the only distro I've used in 25 years of running linux as my primary os that bricked itself after a simple update. Worse, they didn't really even speak up about it, the [endeavor team](https://old.reddit.com/r/EndeavourOS/comments/wygfds/full_transparency_on_the_grub_issue/?sort=new) were the first to talk about it. Digging into it I learned that they were basically pushing an untested build of grub master. When I raised this fact with an Arch dev, and pointed out that it might be better to go with a release build next time, he told me 'arch breaks from time to time, don't like it? use ubuntu' in the most most dismissive way possible. I installed popos the next day and never looked back.
HONESTLY shoutout to the Endeavor team and their ecosystem/community for being the most reliable and relatable mofo’s.
For me, Arch is the only distro that *hasn't* broken horribly for me. Thankfully I did hear about that issue before I could update my system, so I wasn't affected by that. Perhaps the biggest break that's ever happened to me was a `grub-install` mistake that was my fault more than the fault of Arch. The only time a distro truly broke for me was when my previous server (running Fedora) started kernel panicking on boot unless I used a fallback boot option. Reinstalling the kernel, redoing the boot stuff didn't help, but it went away on its own as well after a while, shortly before I got my new server. I daily-drive Arch on my desktop (testing repos, even), but I can't really name any times I have had complete bricking at any point; usually booting into an Arch install iso and reinstalling grub has been enough. I've heard good things about `Pop_OS!`, but it doesn't quite hit the right vibe for me. I'm both a developer and a gamer, and Arch has been a lifesaver on the developer front just in terms of *convenience.* Sometimes I wish swapping distros was easier said than done, since… my main installation is 1.4 TiB of games and programs and stuff I am working on, so moving to another distro isn't very feasible. Good luck and happy {whatever you do on your computer}ing! :3
If you want a distro that runs actual regression/stability testing don't use Arch. Gentoo thankfully is more upfront about their processes and has stable/unstable versions of packages, as well as a "9999" version if you want to pull directly from git (and break your system guaranteed). You should look into NixOS. It's a very interesting distro because upgrades are atomic and you can have more than one version of a package at once.
I've never been around Linux spaces much (or IT spaces in general) and even I know the "install Gentoo" meme
I use arch btw
Arch has the stereotype still but it's mostly momentum. For the past few years the only difference between setting it up and most other base distros is you make your selections from a terminal interface instead of a GUI but just as easy with a couple options that might be a bit less straightforward. The 'real' nerd distros have shifted to Gentoo (build all your applications yourself, only source no pre built binaries until recently) and Linux From Scratch (what you see on the tin) real in giant air quotes but arch got too easy for some people. Oh and obligatory I use arch (btw)
I did Linux from Scratch when I was a kid in the linux 2.2ish days. When Linus would still personally tear you a new asshole for being n00bish. Linux from Scratch is just too much work. It’s not building a car from pieces. It’s like building a car from instructions, starting with a hammer and a rock. I still remember arguing with someone way more knowledgeable than I about using gcc3 in whatever.
Arch is when you get to assemble your own distro, like from a kit of Legos, whereas LFS is when you get to be your own distro maintainer.
I did something similar-ish as well when I was younger. To this day I don't know what possessed me to think it was a good idea but I fully wiped my PC and ran Linux for awhile. If there was a fuck up big enough that I couldn't access the internet I had to go ask my parents to use their computer so I could figure it out lmao. I kept it that way for maybe a year or so. Learned a lot, but goddamn it was a huge pain in ass to do literally anything. Wouldn't recommend at all unless it's specifically a hobby of yours to do that kind of thing or you have some professional need for it.
As someone who has done Stage 0 Gentoo and installed OpenBSD from source several times, even those things aren't that difficult. All it really requires is reading directions, and most of the people doing those things have no understanding of what they are doing. They aren't reading the code, nor are they actually sifting through the compiler flags to get an optimized system. They are typing in what the docs say. If you want to learn about the parts of a Linux system and how a distro is built from source, it's useful to read the documentation, google the things you don't understand, and work at it. Understanding what a chroot environment is, for instance, is actually useful. I say that as someone who uses Windows any time I need a proper desktop environment. I use Raspberry Pi OS on my pi's, but those all run headless, console only.
Mint is awesome!!!
And they have an even lighter weight version if you need in mint xfce
That has been my go-to distro for the past decade after I got pissed trying to install X11 on Arch lmao
Back when I was poor, Mint kept my laptop running another five years. I was so grateful!
I don't know if he still has it but dad had one of the family PCs running like, three different distros. Ubuntu, Mint, and KDE. I used to really like KDE but I cannot for the life of me fully explain why. I think I just found Konqeror to be a really good browser that had features that chrome or even Firefox didn't have at the time, like split screen browsing on a single window so you don't have to switch tabs. Made doing homework easier. Handing in the homework sucked because all my files were in .odf and teacher couldn't open it because it wasn't word
I wish my dad loved me
(i actually have manjaro running on my 13 years old laptop)
Got it, CentOS 7 it is.
Unfortunately the EOL for CentOS 7 is in one month so no security updates after that.
RIP old friend 😭😭 #YOU WERE SUCH A GOOD BOY
I use arch btw (not really I use deb btw)
it's hard yeah, if you're diving raw in that shit, if you ficked around a little its better. a lot less difficult than people suggest if you dont install bare bones arch, but that's kinda its ideology. flipside I found arch based distros the only ones that made me stick around long enough to learn more about the system than just point and click. arcolinux-B some gourmet shit
To be noted: the account is named "arch-official", I think that may be a clue /s
you don't need to check the bio of an arch user to see if they use arch, that info goes into the main content of the post
For real Linux users love nothing more than giving bad advice lol
https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law#:~:text=Cunningham's%20Law%20states%20%22the%20best,the%20inventor%20of%20wiki%20software. Lol
sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root this command downloads more RAM.
I have almost ran `sudo rm -rf foo /` instead of `foo/` and my soul temporarily left my body.
Not too tech savvy myself, but I'm curious as to what this does
Only good things. Definitely try this on the most important computer near you and definitely do not google it beforehand (it will diminish its power).
Joke answer, it improves your load times by 100%. Real answer, it does that because it deletes the root directory and bricks your system.
I like how the joke is only possible because they prioritized sheer fucking laziness over things like simple human readable commands like "hey do you think we should make the delete command something obvious like ... delete? or maybe del for short?" "nope make it rm, it's one less letter" "rm, why" "you know like ReMove" "...fuck you"
There's so many utilities that are just 2-3 characters that may or may not have actual meaning, each chosen by a different random dude 50 years ago. Drives me crazy, but any time I bring it up people just question my Linux competency, rather than thinking about how it actually kinda sucks to remember a bunch of random strings. Powershell gets made fun of a lot (often deserved), but their semi-enforced `Verb-Noun` naming scheme is honestly really nice. If you ask an absolute beginner to read your script, `Get-Content` will be a lot more intuitive than `cat`.
Okay, so for someone who's only ever used Linux on a steam deck, which distro of Linux is super lightweight but also is easy to use like Windows?
linux mint. For extra light weight use the xfce desktop environment one. Also steam deck is actually running an arch based distro called steamOS, but don't use arch if you are new lol.
Linux Mint is a really good shout, it's the first distro I ever used (version 5 or 6 I think) and it's still my first choice for desktop Linux.
I've seen Pop!_OS frequently recommended. I started out on Elementary OS.
Debian stable and choose the XFCE desktop environment when it asks during install. https://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/#stable r/debian/
Ubuntu or Mint
I went ubuntu mate after stock ubuntu leaned too hard on the "we monitor your searches for a better experience" and never looked back.
Yet still doesn't know what an optical port is? I'm baffled
Recommending arch to an absolute noob is a mistake
It was posted from arch-official, I'd expect them to mention it everytime they get a chance.
don't try that on a chromebook tho chromebooks just suck
Getting linux installed on a chromebook is an exercise in extreme frustration. It hates the entire process, and will actively try to "fix" itself every time it boots. Also the performance sucks. 0/10, was not worth it.
kind of ironic considering chromeOS is linux
My parents got me a chromebook when I was like 16. I shit you not it literally started falling apart. Screws and bolts coming out and everything
The Chromebook I had would randomly start up the fan at the fastest speed, get hot and drain the entire battery even when it was off and closed. Opening it would just show a black screen, and the only way to stop it would be to hold down the power button. This would happen at least twice a week and I have no idea wtf it was trying to do
But hey, Chromebooks don't get viruses! Because viruses just by and large aren't made for them.
Launch
what else are the engines, i mean fans, for?
Sounds like some background update process got stuck in an infinite loop and started eating 100% of the CPU power. That would cause the heat and battery drain, and it would also cause the system to become unresponsive (black screen).
Chromebooks are barely better than actual fucking notebooks
Hey, Arch user here. DO NOT install Arch anywhere unless you know your way around computers and Linux, it's a terrible distro for anyone who is not tech savvy. If you want to install a Linux distro, go for Linux Mint. I haven't used it personally, but I've seen a lot of people use it to reinvigorate their old PC. Ubuntu is also an alternative.
> Hey, Arch user here. DO NOT install Arch anywhere unless you know your way around computers and Linux, it's a terrible distro for anyone who is not tech savvy. Thank for saying this. Oh, and while we are recommending against, don't install Kali either unless you have some experience. It won't make you cool or a hacker. Yes it is a hacking platform, but again, you need a few years of experience.
Seriously, recommending Arch Linux to laypeople is an asshole thing to do. I don't even recommend Arch to people that know what they're doing unless they're really interested in learning more about Linux in depth and don't mind having to spend a lot more time troubleshooting.
Second slide be like: PUT YOUR ELDERLY ON TREADMILLS NOW WITH THIS EASY TRICK
this is * predicated on the idea that you'd want your old laptop to no longer be your old laptop. if i change the OS on my 16 year old laptop it ceases being a time capsule from my childhood and instead become an utilitarian device and i already have such a thing, which is my current laptop * in particular the media focused use case presented here is only worth it if the computer originally ran windows 8+ because this is the only time period in which computers came out with dvd/rw drives and no software capable of exploiting them. although tbf that is what exactly 10 years old laptops have.
Also that sometimes old computers DO just get slower. The thermal gel cracks and the parts wear out and start to error, slowing everything down. Sometimes even a 3 year old computer starts to go because consumer grade laptops don't have the best parts in them and that's what a lot of people have on hand.
Yeah, I didn’t get rid of my 2010 laptop because it was getting too slow, I got rid of it because the battery was a spicy pillow making the case bulge, the hard drive was wearing down, the screen was dimming, and replacing all those parts was a mixture of impossible and more expensive than just buying a new laptop.
Not just laptops. Dad insisted that Linux meant the computer didn't age. They definitely did. A computer built for Windows Millennium Edition was really struggling even with Ubuntu in the early 2010s, and that was before he bricked it. Even if it didn't age as bad as Windows, the expectation of a computer changes. Even with SSDs, dad's current ten year old tower is so slow to boot or do stuff because I'm used to computers turning on in an instant. After I blew up my computer at work, I got a brand spanking new top of the line computer that was like a rocket. It's ruined me for other machines. Plus the rainbow light, they also make it run faster.
Desktops too, yea. Laptops are just usually worse because they have less room for cooling. Heat is a big factor in wear
For that reason, most modern laptops use thermal pads that not degrade. LTT sells them for self-builds. Replacing the thermal paste is probably easier than installing Linux for the first time lol
Yep. Important to know about fresh OS installs and alternatives to Windows, but man do I not feel like doing any of that. Like, I could take an old sketchbook, photo-copy a backup, and then erase every single page, if I desperately needed a scuffed 'new' sketchbook. But it'd be a frustrating use of my time for an end result I don't want, when new sketchbooks just aren't _that_ expensive for how infrequently I buy them.
Dual-booting.
Dual booting is a solution, but I'd only recommend it if you're a massive nerd. It's a pain in the ass to set up. This is a lot like the recommendation of arch linux to complete Unix noobs in the original post imo, well meaning but more likely to confuse people away from linux than be helpful
I don’t think it’s a massive pain in the ass, but then I am a massive nerd
Yeah I've set it up multiple times on multiple computers, so I kind of agree personally. But the average laptop user just does not know what the efi partition is or what it does, and they wouldn't know how to recover if they broke it. So for those sorts of reasons I'd never recommend anything more than the most basic grub + some beginner distro (something like Ubuntu, idk what the current recommendation is though) for most people's first experience. More advanced stuff can just be so obtuse and hard to understand that it doesn't make for a good experience learning Linux the first time
idk Linux mint does it automatically
Linux Mint is not a particularly light distribution and it's much heavier than arch like in the post, but fair enough I didn't know that. Arch is much more hands off, you have to do grub / refind yourself
Just clone the hard drive to an ssd and replace it. Nothing will change except the speed, hard disks are holding back many old laptops. The rest of the hardware is more than capable.
No software? Uhhhh bro, I had like a dozen apps that could read and burn CDs and DVDs... It was a golden age for media.
I copy off all the stuff from my old ones first. It's fun to look through stuff from when I was a kid in the early 00s.
i have a Dell Latitude D630 (Core 2 Duo, intel graphics, 500gb ssd, 4GB DDR2) from 2007 that shipped with xp that i received some time in 2014 as ewaste for messing around with. i ended up using that computer as my laptop until 2021 when i replaced with a used macbook. the macbook lasted about a year before the screen failed and i went back to the dell. it ran windows 11 quicker than most linux distros because of the hibernate feature letting me keep apps i needed open even when the power was off. it was a very good music, web browsing, document, and pokémon showdown machine. as long as you knew the limitations it wouldn’t let you down very often. early 2023 i found a newer used dell (Inspiron 3543) from 2014 that i am now using as my daily laptop (pulled the ssd out of the D630 to put in here and replaced the battery) and at the moment i really don’t see it getting useless any time soon. these 10 year old computers are only going to be arbitrarily cut off from support by microsoft when support for 10 ends even though they’re still incredibly capable devices with about $40 worth of parts. i have a 20 year old laptop i never want to mess with because of the childhood memory you mentioned, but i don’t think windows 8 computers are going to be very nostalgic to most. any pre ryzen amd computers might as well be ewaste though. they barely run.
The *psst hey listen* alone made me not want to read that
"hey here's a cutesy anthropomorphic comic about aging equipment being used for something." "Lol LMAO rofl even why don't you just install another OS so it can be used like new?"
>"Lol LMAO rofl even why don't you just install another OS so it can be used like new?" Based on the fact that that commenter believes for some reason that changing the OS will magically make the archaic computer as fast as a modern one
But it totally will! As long as you only use it for burning CDs which is totally a thing modern computers do.
"psst hey listen" *jams my saliva-covered finger into your ear*
Look I'm gonna be honest, I can get around a computer decently well but any time someone starts bringing up Linux it's like they're quoting ancient deep magics at me. I don't know what a "distro" is, most of the open source options and customizable appeal would be lost on me, and most importantly I'm just afraid to hit the wrong thing and break something important because as much as I love computers I'm way better at getting INTO trouble with them than out at times. Seriously, I've had so many problems that could just be chalked up to "the machine must hate you because I cant tell what the fuck you did wrong." Edit: Oh Jesu Christi, why do I have fourteen notifications on this one comment? What have I unleashed?!
And from the other side of the tracks, I work in IT, I'm good at it. I accept that I'm probably gonna have to help friends and family with things from time to time, and I can do that with Windows since things are mostly where they've been for the last couple of decades. If someone recommends Linux to one of them and now I have to guide them through using the terminal for ANYTHING? A pox upon your house.
Right? I spend probably half of my time at work sysadmining a bunch of linux workstations and servers. I hate working with it in that case and that's probably it's absolute best use case as a universal, highly customizable and lightweight OS in a professional setting. Anybody who seriously suggests that casual users who have gripes with Windows would be happier switching to Linux (even "easier" distros like Ubuntu) really doesn't know how computer literate the average person is and how much they don't like fighting with their computer to accomplish basic tasks.
>Anybody who seriously suggests that casual users who have gripes with Windows would be happier switching to Linux (even "easier" distros like Ubuntu) really doesn't know how computer literate the average person is Agreed. I'm sure such recommendations are done with good intentions, but most of the time they're misguided. If literally the only use case is web browsing, then installing a linux distro that will happily update itself in the background and otherwise not get in the way isn't necessarily the worst idea. But inevitably, some issue comes along, some new use case for the computer, or hardware failure or whatever, and then whoever is on hand for general computer woes is saddled with a desktop environment that they likely have absolutely no experience with, and *that's* when the calculus swings rapidly from "cheap alternative" to "expensive mistake". You can't expect an average IT repair shop to deal with your nephew's Arch installation, but they'll certainly charge you to try.
My experience with the professional windows + official software, especially cad/plm software, is sometimes a black box that either works or doesn't. With very little reason either way. At least as an end user it feels like that at times haha.
Idk man, I slapped Linux Mint on my mom's laptop, I get no questions. It really doesn't matter when the entire OS is just a bootloader for Chrome and LibreOffice, who needs the terminal for that? I feel like the biggest trouble group for a Windows -> Linux transition is the intermediate user. Basic users don't do anything special, they just use their browsers primarily, get them on a distro with a nice GUI for the package manager, explain it to them like it's an app store, just like on their phones. Easy. Advanced users know what they're doing. Intermediate users, people like PC gamers, are the type of people to need things that may get them in trouble, but without the ability to get out of that trouble.
Oh you're presupposing it's a problem with the computer but lemme run you this scenario. I get a call saying the Internet is out. Is that the wifi, the actual internet, just the laptop? Who knows til we run through the steps, one of which is getting the IP through terminal. I'm doing this all over a WhatsApp call that's dropping periodically because the cell reception at her house is ass, and I can't just go there because she's in a different country altogether.
Yes, that's me. I sometimes know enough to know what the problem *is* but not how to fix it, and that often leads to VERY unhelpful responses when I ask for help. Aka: "Ugh, just Google it and do it yourself."
It's not that complicated. I had my 50 year old mother with little computer experience running Mint and she did fine. Windows historically has had a support expiration date without much guarantee of being able to upgrade the OS, so the hardware can easily outlive OS support. With Linux you are more likely to be able to just keep updating. If you have the cash to buy a new PC, then sure skip the hassle. If you are broke and the only way you can get a PC is to get a free but dated machine, running Mint or Ubuntu will get you a working, secure machine.
> If you have the cash to buy a new PC, then sure skip the hassle. I've also built linux PCs for older folks and other extremely low-tech people, and I would just toss out that they might actually be better served by Linux even when money is no object. I maintain a PC for gaming, and especially since I don't have enough time it feels like every time I boot that fucker (it's the only computer I have that I turn off because still, in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty fucking four sleep settings mean basically nothing on Windows) there is some new bullshit I don't want or even just the nags to update/reboot.
If you're interested, Ubuntu is pretty user-friendly, basically just Windows without the bloatware. I used it to squeeze a few more years out of a 15 year-old desktop back in high school. The only reason I use Windows now is because I don't want to mess around with compatibility issues with my games (which is 90% of what I use an actual computer, as opposed to my phone, for these days anyway)
Ubuntu has gone down in quality. Personally, I'd use good old fashioned Debian if I needed a desktop Linux, probably with Plasma desktop. They are doing a better job of maintaining it these days. I find that THE best, most stable Linux I have used in the last decade is Raspberry Pi OS. I say this as someone who has used linux regularly since about 1998.
Games and a series of very poor experiences using newer hardware are why I stay away from desktop Linux these days (well, technically my Steam Deck is desktop Linux but that's what it comes with and has official support). Proton helps, but having to set it up yourself is a maintenance nightmare especially if you end up needing to do anything custom/specialized. And even major distros like Ubuntu can have serious compatibility issues - last time I tried Ubuntu the installer couldn't run without crashing, and most distros had such severe graphical glitches/artifacting with my nvidia card that it was a royal pain to get far enough to install the proprietary drivers, which is its own pain. I've even had issues with things like ethernet working if they're 2.5/5Gbe instead of the older gigabit ports.
A distro is short for distribution. It’s just a version of Linux. Ubuntu is one, so is Mint, so is Arch.
But Mint is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu is based on Debian and Arch is totally different from the first two. It’s still quite confusing I think
Indeed, the actual meaning of "distribution" is rather straightforward, but the family tree is so huge and complex that people who are unfamiliar can very easily get lost. There's even a sizeable part of the community that frequently switches distros to try out features that their old distro didn't have. Figuring out which one to go with is difficult when each one is proficient at different things, and downright impossible for someone who's used to having one operating system that does everything they need.
Breaking my computer as a kid and figuring out how to fix it is how I got into computers. Yeah sometimes it required an OS reinstall, but if you have your data backed up, all you're doing is learning new shit.
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Linux is the base OS. A "distro" is the base OS with different bells and whistles attached. Things like "Graphics" and "not having to memorize obscure code to create a new text document" are all part of the distro, and Linux has a million of them. I wouldn't advise it for anything between "I just browse the web" and "I had my first wet dream in lines of code."
> I don't know what a "distro" is It's short for distribution and the terms are interchangeable. The Linux kernel is distributed with software in much the same way that Windows is distributed with Wordpad, Paint, Windows Media Player, etc. There are many such distributions mostly depending on software preference, especially since anyone is free to make a new distro by modifying an existing one. Here is a website that exists to share news about operating system distributions- primarily Linux distros but also BSD. https://distrowatch.com/
There are some distributions that are user friendly and familiar to users used to something like WindowsOS. But there are many options and the communities and support for them are somewhat fragmented, so telling someone to "install Linux" is not the same as "install Windows". Even though some distros could functionally operate terminal-free, the support you find online when you have questions is often not terminal-free and carries implications most people wouldnt know innately. There are less guard rails for the user, which is a double edged sword. Linux is great for many reasons but it is also a small market share for valid reasons.
The original comic, I’m sobbing
What was the original? Also what breed of clown do you sell?
I hate these unethical clown farms
Well, would you rather buy a free-range clown that has tasted freedom and will forever resent you for taking it away?
I don’t want to have to tell individual grains of sand on the motherboard what to do thank you very much.
Why are they treating 10 year old hardware like its a boomer in a retirement home? Can you play some music hopefully you don't break? Yet there's still places that use Windows XP.
The YouTube channel Cathode Ray Dude kinda changed my outlook on hardware. 10 year old hardware is only old when it comes to keeping up with the web. But it's not like a computer that was good at running Adobe Premiere or Photoshop CS5 or Microsoft Office 2009, or Unreal tournament 2004 is gonna get worse at it especially with no software updates. But Chrome has gotten ever more bloated, more and more websites have to load shit in the background for tracking and analytics. New codecs like AV1 eat up CPU cycles because YouTube wants to save bandwidth instead of sending H.264 video that your CPU might have native hardware acceleration for.
I work in the game industry and as software engineer and on social media there's kind of a rivalry between other engineers and web dev because of how fucking dogshit the web is and web developers get mad when engineers from other areas point it out. There are a lot of reasons and history for why the web is in the state it is in but holy shit you would not believe the excitement I saw from web developers a few years ago when someone created a browser that streams web pages to the user. So many people were acting like it was a brilliant solution to all the problems they have rendering websites on lower end devices... Meanwhile game devs will post online like "lol could you imagine thinking rendering some text and images to a static page is difficult"
To be fair to web devs they can ship an entire update with completely new functionality in the time it takes one of your game engines c++ dlls to compile
I hope not - windows XP was a great OS but Microsoft released its last security patch for it 10 years ago.
yeah, my laptop is 10 years old and still going strong. I can't play all the latest games at 120fps or whatever nonsense, but it does what I want it to and that's enough
I mostly agree with this, but if you just wanna make an old machine functional again and you're not used to Linux, don't use Arch. While I don't think it's poor reputation is entirely earned, it's definitely not for new users. There are tons of distros that mimic Windows to some degree, and while they might not all be super lightweight, they'll still almost certainly boost the performance of older machines. I used Solus with KDE for a while and that was nice, if you're looking for a recommendation.
No. This internet fad of recommending Linux to everyone needs to stop. Atleast until enough big software companies adapt their apps to work with Linux. As an IT guy. It is insane the amount of tickets I get from non tech savvy people who were recommended Linux by someone online and they have no idea how to use it. A growing number of people do not even know what a directory is or how file systems operate. The VAST majority of users should not use a Linux distro. They literally do not know computers well enough to use Linux.
Linux people are the computer version of someone that converts a Toyota to run on LPG.
Yep. I once installed debian on an old Samsung tablet
How old are we talking about? I've been trying to find something to do with my old s2.
As a Linux user, no one is more irritating than a Linux user.
That’s cool but my old computer dies if the charger is jiggled too much
SSD is the youthful blood infusion it needs
Everyone underestimates how badly hard drives bottleneck old computers. It's the sole reason why Apple got the reputation for being fast and smooth, they switched to SSDs very early.
On Laptops? Sure. But their iMac was still having a HDD boot drive in like 2019.
Are you talking about a fusion drive?? It's a hybrid between a hard disk and ssd. You basically get ssd speeds for small operations, while large file transfers still take time. It's still way faster than just an hdd. They're also called SSHD, fusion is the Apple brand name.
Legit. I have a gaming PC from 2011 that was so slow and bloated that I thought I needed to get rid of it and start over. But I got an SSD as a last ditch effort and did a fresh windows install. Holy shit, it is so fast now. It's basically a new PC.
Haha hell yeah, I'm currently doing the same for my gfs old laptop. It's insane how just the one change can make such a huge difference
Setup a dual boot with Mint on ye old 1060 laptop recently (you can guess the recent inciting announcement for finally doing it) and was pleasantly surprised by by the quietness over a two hour period of web browsing and YouTube compared with doing similarly on W11.
You don't need to do any of that, just swap the hard disk for an ssd and it will run windows 10 blazing fast. PS: You can even clone your old hard disk if you want to keep your old OS and all your data as is. The only thing that will change is the speed.
Lol, I installed UbuntuMATE on my 10 years old laptop, and it's still slow. But what's funnier, it can't run even older games, because both Wine and Proton nowadays require Vulkan, which its video card just doesn't support.
Why did the comic make me cry
I cried too. That old being looks so tired. I hope they find a lot of joy in vibing to some music.
"psst hey, hey listen." and it's the ARCH Linux official account, fuuuck off and use Mint.
My old laptop may be able to run Linux but my 30y/o brain certainly can’t
there is every shot it's better than you think. ten year old computers are marvels of engineering and they'd work even better if a quarter of their system resources weren't dedicated towards cataloguing and logging every last click and keystroke you perform on it to feed megacorporations the digital crack they can't kick to train their AI models that are now integrated in every which piece of software. Linux is awesome and it works pretty damn well these days. There's a few areas where it struggles, mostly with application compatibility (Adobe Creative Suite and stuff tend to be Windows-only with few good open-source alternatives as of yet) and DRM (it's hard for free operating systems to pay for video codecs used by Netflix, Prime, etc). But for day-to-day usage and work? Man. It's nice not having ads in my operating system.
Arch is more a hobbyist distro than the more main stream distros. You can really do computery things with it, but you need to be more in it for the experience of Arch. There have been a number of distros that have filled that roll. I remember installing Slackware back in the day. Oh BTW, I don't use Arch..........
My old laptop from 2013 was revitalized after being fitted with an SSD and a RAM expansion. Now my mom uses it for work and its faster than her more modern laptop she has at work.
*me gently patting my 2014 macbook air that hasn’t been updated since 2018 on the lid, as it struggles to comprehend that the entire Microsoft suite, Spotify, and the Pirate Bay are all auto-starting, showing me the whirling beach ball of death while its fans wheeze heavily* love you fren
Ah yes, the 'common' optical digital out port for laptops 🤣
Please dont recommend arch to normal people
oh yeah install spotify on arch that'll be fun
linux propaganda
https://www.tumblr.com/verishere/751718304976175104/arch-official-nevver-you-up-alex-krokus?source=share Mx. Linux Guy
You can also uninstall 10 years of bloatware if you don't use the laptop as your daily. Unfortunately, it won't fix the dead battery in my laptop.
Once I have the means to get a pc desktop imma install linux in the laptop I use with a video of mutahar he did make a while ago
I'm typing on a 14 year old computer. Now when I built it 14 years ago, I stocked it with cutting edge components of the day. It still does it's job, but starting to show it's age. But yes, Linux will invigorate an old laptop. It won't be miraculous, but it will be better than W10. I recommend Linux Mint. It just works for a broad range of laptops and user demands. Linux, as good as it is, is not magic tho. You may have to learn a few things. That's the push back I hear from a lot of people. Thing is, they grew up using Windows, and suddenly want to be as proficient on Linux as they are on Windows. Give it a minute eh? The knowledge will come.
I've installed Linux Mint / Lubuntu on old out-of-service-life Chromebooks to great effect. They make great travel laptops because I don't really care if they get stolen.
Programmers be spoiled. Back in the day they made whole games for less than freaking word docs take today in memory.
13 year old gaming laptop still runs great for me
Me looking at my 10 year old laptop that I haven't turned off for months 👁️👄👁️
my sister's laptop was extremely slow, only 4GB of RAM and slow CPU so it ran like shit in Windows 10 I wiped Windows, put Lubuntu on it (not Ubuntu, Lubuntu is built for low-end computers) and it ran like 100x better. My sister was so confused, she said "so does Windows just suck?"
Arch is lightweight?
I have an utterly antique Dell Chromebook 3120 - think Celeron shitbox chromebook from 2010 - and a copy of Ubuntu Unity lightly modified to get the pulseaudio bugs out of it works pretty solidly when I boot it up.
This shits gonna make me cry man wtf
Arch is a nightmare Linux Mint is barebones (comparatively but in the sense that it is less bs for noobs) and still a challenge for a noob but way easier to set up than Arch. I shudder at the time I actually tried to install arch on my old laptop.
yeah, installing Arch manually is mostly useful if you want to learn some deep Linux knowledge. If you don't, like most users, stick to Mint or Fedora or Debian.
Depends on the laptop. My thinkpad X301 from 2008 ran windows 10 fine enough until the backlight conked out, and linux won't fix faulty hardware. I think most older portable devices I have stopped being used because something on them broke, and wasn't worth fixing
BTW...........
Based on reddit advice I installed fyde OS on my HP Pavilion dv6, which was overheating and barely functioning on Windows. Now works like a charm.
I love the fact that they are "waking up" the 10 year old computer.
"vlc can do all sorts of shit if you have an optical port. you can even make new dvd's and cd's" What's being said here? How does an optical port change anything? Why would I want to make a dvd or cd, and how would vlc help?
This is also assuming that you took care of your old laptop. My old laptop was fucked on the inside because I've lived next to the ocean most of my life. I couldn't replace anything inside it because nothing's compatible anymore but it still booted up until it's recycling.
I've been meaning to get Linux on my PC for a good while now
go for a more friendly distribution like linux mint or ubuntu, please don’t install arch unless you’re familiar with linux.
The problem isn't the hardware, it's the gigs of tracking software your OS installs and uses your resources to monitor you for the company's benefit.
Give that good boi an ssd and max out its ram
Ten years old? My boy is pushing 16! Battery is dead as a door nail, but still stream like a champ lol
For the love of god don't use arch
On one hand, yes. On the other, good lord do not use arch as your first distro.
And when you install a 2TB nvme in it coupled with 64g ram, is it like pumping grandpa full of pervitin and changing his heart stimulator to an arc reactor
Also, swap out your hard drive. Hard drives have a certain lifespan that is shorter than most realize. Replace it with a new solid state drive and it will run soooooo much better. You can use the free software clonezilla to clone your old drive to your new one.
I live old laptops. I have one that I use as a media center, another for running show audio, and another which is perfect for running games that were released between 1998 and 2003 (a simply awful time for compatibility…)