Hello and welcome to episode 46 of Linux After Dark.
I'm Joe, I'm Chris, I'm Gary, and I'm Dalton.
Welcome back Chaps.
A few episodes ago we talked about the idea of lightweight Linux,
and that got us talking after we'd finished recording about
what is the oldest hardware that would be willing to daily drive.
And so we've all been digging out our old laptops
and kind of seeing what we'd be willing to put up with.
And what exactly daily drive means I think is going to be up for debate
because you've got work and recreation and they are not necessarily
the same in terms of what you need computing wise.
So Gary, what is the oldest hardware you would be willing to daily drive?
So the machine that I dug out of the stack of laptops was a ThinkPad T400,
but unlike most ThinkPad T400s, this one was running Libra Boot.
So specs wise, it is a Cauti Geo P8600,
which is a 2.4 gigahertz Cauti Geo 8 gigs of RAM tried with 4 gigs
and it just wasn't going anywhere in terms of getting
anything daily driver where they'd done and just a random SSD
that I pulled out of a drawer and pin it.
So how did you end up with that?
So I've had this ThinkPad for quite a long time
and it was running the stock firmware.
And I think we've mentioned a few times on the show you can go,
oh yeah, well, there's those people with Libra Feated Thinkpads.
So I thought I'd give it a go, looked into flashing it myself
and I didn't have the correct kind of eProm readers and everything else.
Say, if I'm being honest, I gave it to a workmate who does do that kind of stuff
and asked them to flash Libra Boot on it for me.
And the machine came back with Libra Boot on.
And hopefully nothing else?
Yeah, I hope so.
I mean, I do trust the guys.
Sure, it's fine.
People sell them a horrendous markup on eBay pre-flashed or try to.
I don't know if the how many successful sales they have.
But yeah, these very, very old Thinkpads pre-flash with Libra Boot
with a huge accompanying.
This is a staleman-esque, like this is a really free computer
that really belongs to you and is worth the money.
Yeah, it's like double the price of what you'd actually get
one of these Rapial Thinkpads for.
I absolutely did not go and spend 150 quits on a 50-year-old Thinkpads.
That would be crazy.
So what was it like putting Linux on it then?
Was it just a standard?
Didn't even notice the difference or what?
I probably wouldn't have done was I not trying to install from a Ventor USB
which just did not work particularly well.
I couldn't get the Ventor boot menu to show up.
But when I just downloaded the Debian Stable ISO and yes, Debian Stable
because it's an old machine, so why not use a distray with some old software in?
It was pretty normal.
Say, the only thing that I had to do which was slightly weird
was manually set the video mode in the Grub command line.
But once I've done that, it booted into the installer
and every subsequent boot was perfectly normal.
I was just thinking, I haven't done that for 13 years.
Oh yeah, correct.
Yeah, it's about the vintage of this machine.
And so you found this machine to be okay to do daily tasks on,
even though it's really, really old.
Yeah, so I've been using it on and off throughout the last week or so,
since we spoke about it.
And yeah, like mostly for just browsing and stuff watching YouTube in 720p was absolutely fine.
And to be honest, the thing has only got a 1440 by 900 display anyway.
So anything above that is wasted on it.
But this afternoon, I tried to give it a real test.
So I thought, I'm going to go and build up all of the stuff that I use for my home infrastructure
in Docker on this machine from scratch.
And I thought, actually, I'm just going to use it exactly the same as I do my daily driver thinkpad,
which is an X13 Gen T.
So installed VS code on it, installed Spotify on it, installed Chrome on it,
and signed into my Google account, telegram, flat pack, all of that stuff.
Just set up on the machine and just set about using it as I normally would.
And I got pretty far.
So in terms of containers, there was next cloud running on there.
There was actually an open LDAP server running on there.
There was a key cloak server running on there, all in separate containers.
And it wasn't until I started really cranking up a few Java applications
that it got a little bit slow.
And extracting container images slower than I'd expect.
And yeah, everything was perfectly usable.
Spotify continued playing in the background throughout.
I had about 15 Chrome tabs open, all of which were perfectly fine and responsive.
None of them seemed to kick into the Chrome memory saver mode.
Everything seemed OK.
It was noticeably slower than my usual machine.
But I could live with it if I had to.
What about you, Don?
Which one did you drag out?
I tried two different things.
I tried a mobile device, and I tried a laptop.
So for the mobile device, this is short.
I tried a 2013 Nexus 7 tablet.
And I put Linear Joe S on it.
You can get current Linear Joe S for that device, as long as you repartition it.
Loaded up new pipe, tried to play a video at 720p60, and it completely lagged.
It could do 720p30 just fine.
But a 60 frames per second, it completely dies.
I assume it doesn't have a decoder for that.
I've got one of those.
But the charging port is broken on it.
Or maybe the charging controller, I don't know.
But I almost bought a new board for it.
But I just thought it's too old and rubbish.
Yeah.
It's pretty rough.
As for the laptop situation, I have an old ASUS T300G, which is a 2.1 convertible with a active pen.
That's why I got it in 2015.
Because I wanted something to take notes while I was in college.
And I didn't want a notebook because I'm a nerd.
So I got the Fedora KDE Remix release going on it.
Fedora 38 is a good release, by the way.
Good work, everyone.
And it's okay.
I still stand behind what I said in that light distros and full-fat distros aren't all that different.
It's a machine with a dual core with hyperthreading CPU.
It's a core M3 series and it's got four gigs of RAM.
And it's a little rough.
I don't think I could really use it day to day.
Unless I was just doing things like balancing my budget.
And that's it.
You start to run things like Telegram and Discord on it.
And it starts paging things out into ZRAM.
And then you're really stuck.
Or another thing I found is that discover.
Use like 400-ish megabytes of RAM.
And that kind of eats into it there.
So all in all, a fine experience.
It's still I am so disappointed in how terrible computers have gotten in the intervening eight years since it came out.
Because I installed Linux on it.
And just like the first time I installed Linux on it, suspend works fine.
It loses like a 5% battery in 24 hours and suspend.
My framework dies overnight and suspend.
It always wakes up in three seconds.
Whereas sometimes if you put your framework into deep sleep,
it takes 10 seconds to wake up.
It's great.
Or 20.
It's just amazing how bad the experience has become on newer machines.
What this whole experience really gave me was just an extreme disappointment in new computers.
It's funny you should say that.
Because one of the things that I noticed going back to this old ThinkPad was how much better bill it was than my modern one that I use every day.
And how much I miss stuff like closing the lid and having a real clunk.
And having an LED that tells me the machine's gone to sleep.
And isn't going to overheat in my bag on the walk home from the office.
Things like that.
So yeah, I agree.
There are a lot of things that I do miss about old computers.
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I just had the complete opposite experience really to you because it just made me really appreciate having really good new fast hardware.
Oh, don't get me wrong. The thing was slow and very difficult to use but it worked in a lot of places that count where new computers don't and that really upsets me.
My computing is really split into three mobile, which is just kind of messaging and reading articles and stuff like that.
Laptop, which is mostly media consumption or editing show docs, sending emails, that kind of thing.
But then the real work of editing shows and recording shows that's all done with my desktop.
And when it comes to the desktop, it really just is a case of whatever is the fastest one I've got available.
And so that's why I kind of thought, well, let's say the laptop daily driver, so I don't need to do editing and anything that requires power.
And I tried various of my different laptops from the stack.
And it ultimately comes down to whatever the fastest one available is really because yeah, you can edit documents and send emails from a really old machine.
And by really old, I'm so privileged with this the oldest shit to stop top that I've got is a third gen i3.
But it's a you series i3, so it's really underpowered with four gigs of salted RAM.
That's a Viva book, which is my wife's daily driver laptop.
It's exactly the same as hers and she's just refused to give it up because she's stubborn.
Well, she did say to me the other day, the battery's not that good. Maybe she'll get anyone.
I was like, finally, I can go laptop shopping or I can just give her one from the stack.
Do that.
I actually used to do editing and stuff on this one.
I was away this Viva book when I was in Sicily and I did mint cast and a joy rest podcast from there.
I edited that on this Viva book, but that was quite a while ago to be fair.
And you know, I could do most of us off, but for example, right when I finish editing each episode, I make the YouTube video.
And I use the Python visualizer that we've talked about that a listener kindly patch to work on modern Ubuntu.
And it converts that video at a certain rate and that rate is relative to real time.
So it's a 30 minute episode.
If it does it at one times, it's going to take 30 minutes to do it.
If it does it at 10 times, it's going to take three minutes to do it.
On my current workstation, I can do it about nine times real time, best case if haven't got much else running.
This Viva book just about managed one times real time.
And so I tried another old laptop of mine, which was the one that I edited most of Linux loadouts on.
And that managed it at about 1.5 ish and then the battery died.
So it was kind of creeping up.
But the battery said it was at 60% and then it just turned off.
So that was nice.
But just ultimately just give me the fastest thing that I've got available really.
If I have to use something terrible and old, then I will.
But I'm just very privileged that I've got quite a lot of powerful hardware these days.
A bit like you, Joe, the oldest stuff I have now in the stack of laptops is around third gen.
But I've got to agree with what Gary and Dalton said.
I like using those machines because the input devices are very good.
The keyboards have nice travel.
They are a bit on the fat side, but they have really solid hinges.
They have a mouse, a touchpad with two buttons, two physical separate buttons.
It feels like a very pleasurable computer to use.
The problem is is that they tend to have quite short battery life, get quite hot.
And they have a fan and all the rest of that.
And one machine which I do like to carry with me has a seller on N3350 in it.
Because I was looking at the benchmarks, I was staging it all out.
And it's not that far off the actual performance of those machines.
And as long as it has an SSD and a gigabose of RAM.
Most of the time, I'm happy to use that because it sips six watts and it's completely passive.
And I feel like that is kind of the pattern that happens is that the performance of the very low
kind of what you would have called atoms, and they now are just Pentium and Celerons,
catches up in about three or four years to what was good.
You know, a few years back, basically, I like to carry this machine because it has quite a long battery life.
It has no fan.
It's very lightweight.
And essentially if I lost it or broke it, I wouldn't be that upset.
And it's definitely usable.
And I will pick it up ahead of the more modern machines I have for all of those reasons.
So I think it's fine.
I only notice if I do something intensive.
And I think that's what it really comes down to.
A lot of the time, anything I do that's intensively compute based to do with my work,
I'm messaging into a cluster of computers that do all of the heavy lifting.
So all I need is a terminal that connects to that most of the time.
And I only really notice it's a shit laptop when I do anything like run a very high definition video
in a codec on YouTube that it's just going to struggle with.
But the day to day, I can eminently daily drive it.
And I do sometimes when I'm traveling, I will only carry it with me because I can get the job done with it.
And it is kind of versatile.
And it's from like 2016.
And I think that's what tends to happen.
I think as long as you've got two cores and four threads as well, you're still all right.
Because a lot of stuff relies on the single thread core of the two cores.
And if it has hyper threading, you're going to be okay.
You don't need quad core stuff.
And I think that's what starts to change.
I imagine in a few years time, if we have this conversation again, we'll be like,
no, everything is spread across the four cores now.
And you really feel it when you drop to two.
It's all about trade-offs.
And what you actually have to do with the thing, I think.
Well, if you really forced me to pick one computer that was just going to be that's it.
That's the only computer you've got.
It would be my entryway Apollo, which has got an eighth gen i7, the 8565U,
which is four cores with hyper threading.
And I think I've got 32 gigs of RAM in there as well.
So that really is about as old as I could feasibly go and get my work done, I think.
Yeah, I think ultimately, like, if you really forced me to use some of these old things,
it's not like I couldn't do it.
But new computers are kind of nice.
And it's really possible to get some really good deals on computers that have seen some use,
but are in good shape and are relatively fast.
I haven't paid more than $200 for either of my parents laptops,
and they use them every day.
The only reason why they were that expensive is because I upgraded them to SSDs.
Well, one of the best things that's happened to Linux-friendly hardware is Windows 11
and the hardware requirements for that.
It means that you've got these very capable six and seventh gen i7 and i5 machines
that you can get for peanuts now because they want run Windows 11 officially.
That's good. The ThinkPad T470 was really, I think, a good machine.
So if you can pick one of those up, not a bad deal.
To conclude my final thoughts on it, it would be it has to have two cores,
four threads, eight gigs of RAM and SSD, and the battery has the last between four and five hours away from the wall.
And I think to get there, you either have to have a cellar on from around 2015-16
or somewhere around a sixth, seventh gen i5 or i7,
and that would be where I would draw the line.
Meanwhile, Gary's just crying that he put up with a core 2 drawer for the last week.
It was absolutely fine. I mean, I didn't do any video calls.
I'll get that, but I think I could get by.
And it is fun to go back to some of this hardware and just see one,
how good do we actually have it, how privileged are we actually,
but also how good work computers at that time.
And I think it's a really enjoyable experience and one that I'd recommend to others.
I'll keep the stack in the drawer then.
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Let's do some feedback.
Brendan and quite a lot of other people got in touch with us regarding our episode
about the future and what it's going to hold for your generation alpha kids.
And it seems we missed an important point.
Brendan wrote, first off, to Dalton's idea about people thinking that everything is today
as it always will be.
I'd like to point you to the age like milk phrase from the end of the 19th century
about new patents in the 1900s.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Yeah, humans are idiots.
Secondly, as a father of two with a third on the way,
I'm amazed that no one brought up what will inevitably affect our children
to a huge extent in the middle of the century, climate change.
Having just said that humans are terrible at predicting the future,
I know it's not the smartest thing to immediately predict the future,
but following the science with a massively heating world and government's
industry seemingly unwilling to do anything about it.
I could only assume that the career trajectories of the next generations
will be impacted by natural disasters as well as wars and migration
resulting from huge parts of the earth being made unenhabitable to human life.
But that too is from my 2023 perspective.
Asking someone in 1950 what children of tomorrow would be doing professionally,
I'm sure something about nuclear fission would have come up.
Yeah, keep it light, Brendan.
Come on.
But this is a good point.
We didn't really take into account the potentially huge changes in the world generally.
We kind of just assumed that things would just carry on as they are now
just with faster computers and more AI.
I told you all that's the natural way that humans do things.
Yeah.
We can't think differently.
No, we definitely fell into that 1900s trap.
You think about things like the road or various other post-apocalyptic things.
Are we going to be hand cranking solar batteries to still the most precious
kilowatt hours?
I think we discussed this off air once before.
We just don't think about it as much as maybe we should.
I certainly don't.
The only time I started worrying about power draw for what I was running
was because it was going to hit me in the pocket.
Yeah, exactly.
Same for, I'm sure a lot of people, I'm sure there's a lot of people listening
who deeply care about this stuff and think about it on a daily basis.
But it's just not very nice to think about.
Is it?
And we do this for fun and to entertain people and it's just a bit of a downer,
isn't it?
When you think about the inevitable sort of, well, collapse of humanity I suppose
due to climate change.
I remember talking to someone whose job was in sustainability about this as
well.
And I think it's really difficult to strike a tone that gets people to
listen about this stuff.
That is a real challenge to overcome.
If you run round going, oh my god, it's terrible the world's ending.
Most people don't listen was what he said anyway.
He said being massively alarmist doesn't necessarily always work.
Even though we should be, it's a really difficult topic.
And it's the same thing for me, Joe.
I tend to sort of see computer sometimes as a bit of an escape.
So I don't think about that stuff because it's too heavy.
Well, the KDE Project are thinking about this stuff with their sustainability efforts.
It's a German government certification blower angle, I think it's called.
Yeah, and they're getting involved with that.
And it's certainly starting to think about these things about how software can be
more efficient and more energy efficient.
And you think about all the like CICD pipelines and stuff that must be just churning
constantly, just burning loads of electricity that is potentially not needed.
I don't know how I'm sure some people would disagree with me on that.
Yeah, I mean, I talked to customers about sustainability at work, a reasonable
amount.
And I'd not really thought about the software angle of it either.
Customers are very focused on moving to ARM CPUs or moving to serverless technologies
or whatever else so that they're getting more CPU cycles per what or whatever
the relevant measurement is.
And I don't think many people are really thinking about it from a, yeah,
my five lines of code here might be making this CPU peg for 10 seconds.
And what's the impact of that?
But I think if you look at those things in kind of singular,
they don't really make that much difference.
I think it really does need a big change as to how we approach this stuff and how
we approach software development as a community to really make a difference.
I've noticed that anytime I've tried to optimize something that has never been
optimized before I can usually get about 50% out of it, which is crazy.
But if someone never looks at it and they're doing order event squared loops,
if you figure out a way to collapse that down, you end up losing a lot of time.
Yeah, I think what you said Gary taps into a wider discourse around
the whole of this topic where individual responsibility whilst important
tends to get over for fronted, I think, in my opinion.
I do think we need to have nation state and large capitalisk corporation conversations around it.
It's all very well devolving responsibility to what you're doing individually.
But there's huge amounts of problems with behemoth-sized organizations
that just isn't changing because they're propping up the way everything is run.
That's what's really difficult.
That's why I become quite defeated about it because I just feel like
it's not going to make a difference and there's nothing that I can do.
Again, it's a terrible apathetic position to be in, but it is where I am.
Right, well, we've got to get out of here then.
Remember, show at Linuxhouse2dark.net if you want to send in your feedback.
We'll be back in a couple of weeks, but until then, I've been Joe.
I've been Chris.
I've been Gary.
And I've been Dalton.
See you later.
.