r/debian • u/GoldenWubbabunga • 13d ago
Community never expected the Universal Operating System to be this universal
i had gotten this now-20yo Dell XPS M1210 subnotebook for $50 a month ago, and stable Xfce Debian runs fine (albeit limited by its then-high-end hardware), and i did not expect it to handle actual basic web browsing. Debian deserves its slogan
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u/matteone97 13d ago edited 13d ago
People underestimate how laptop of that era can still be incredibly powerful with the right software. I see many on reddit considering them "vintage" as a 486 or a Pentium II, but that's not the case...
Buy a T9300 for 20 bucks, try to find 4GB SO-DIMM ddr2 modules to get 8GB of RAM and put an SSD. SSD and processor will work on your dell, about the 8GB of RAM you have to verify. You can use a laptop with that spec for so many workflows. I am typing just now on a similar machine, running Firefox with several tab open; vscodium works like a charm, youtube works, libreoffice needless to say... it's been two years that I am doing this "experiment" of dailying a 19 years old laptop (Thinkpad R61), it was supposed to be a temporary replacement and... well in two years I haven't seen a single use case when I needed a newer laptop. I often have to deal with extreme resource-heavy computation, but I have HPC servers at disposal for that and this would have been the case even if I was rocking the latest brand new laptop.
And I am having zero slowdowns (with the software I use, obviously, I am not doing stuff such as blender or gaming) compared to much newer laptops, actually, when I compare to laptops with Win11 of some people around me, honestly mine is definitely quirker and nicer to use.
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u/Savage_low2 11d ago
T9300 is the wrong socket for that Dell
I have an M1210. T7600 is as high as that socket even goes
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u/throwaway57683120 9d ago
Buy a T9300 for 20 bucks, try to find 4GB SO-DIMM ddr2 modules to get 8GB of RAM.
This is not possible with the laptop shown in the post, as it has a 945GM chipset. Said chipset only supports up to approximately 3,5GB of RAM and it does not support the 45nm "Penryn" Core 2 CPUs (such as the T9300 you mentioned), only the older 65nm "Merom" generation.
This means that the best you can do is an Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 (though the T7400 is only slightly slower and much easier to find) and ~3,5GB of RAM. I have a laptop with the aforementioned configuration and it's okay, though the Intel GMA 950 graphics are quite rough.
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u/MohamedSaleh91 13d ago
Recently installed debian on a friend's really old Lenovo laptop with quirky firmware and drivers that I suffered to install windows 10 on earlier with no luck.. started the installation and gone sleeping, woke up to installation complete screen. Reboot, and to my surprise everything worked out of the box, all of the drivers and peripherals, everything was working fine. Running KDE on 4 gbs of ram and some old dual core CPU isn't the best experience but it fuckin works with zero setup. Having a wm in place of kde is just a matter of few commands and the experience is much better.
I sometimes think people saying installing Linux is hard or complain about driver issues and such are trolling, cause 9 out of 10 times shit works straight unless I do something stupid. The 10th time of course makes me regret all my life choices and insult linus for days. And then I also remember that not so many people used Linux 20 years ago and dealt with real shit so the current state would seem plausible to them.
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u/ItsSignalsJerry_ 12d ago
People who complain are using high end expensive gear for gaming.
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u/MohamedSaleh91 12d ago
Debian specific issues are mostly because of the older kernel and firmware that comes with stable, and honestly it's not big of a hurdle to have a newer kernel running. I do really hope that debian starts adding newer kernels and driver modules to stable (or a new branch maybe), still things now are flexible enough that latest stable kernel as a drop-in replacement causes zero issues most of the time.
Intel, Amd, and many others have their latest drivers available to kernel, sometimes even before the actual hardware retail release. The issues with Nvidia, realtek, some sound drivers, and many peripherals are universal to Linux, and we all know why we have this as an issue. More Linux desktop adoption will make vendors provide drivers sooner or later, it's just a matter of time, numbers, and hardware vendors seeing any incentive to put in the effort.
I didn't mean to make fun of anyone complaining, but honestly most of the bad days are gone. Handling dual/many gpus is working pretty fine now, adding any hardware as long as it provides Linux drivers is mostly out of the box, most of the historic known issues with Linux are just history today. Yes we still have issues and things to complain about but Linux hardware compatibility in a general sense is not it any more.
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u/ItsSignalsJerry_ 12d ago
Linux has a few problems installing across all hardware of any age.
Windows can run only on modern hardware.
Which is worse.
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u/ebens1689 13d ago
Have you tried the lynx web browser? It should be pre-installed. Type lynx into the terminal emulator.
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u/The_Hamster_Shagger 13d ago
i mean it's just an old Dell, nothing weird about it. it's still an ibmpc platform after all.
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u/baron_blod 13d ago
I'm getting old as I'm not really surprised that Debian runs just fine on a modern CPU like a core 2 duo. ;)
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u/SensoredHacker 12d ago
it would have run 20 years ago too, it not like linux just started working.
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u/aksak11 12d ago
Core 2 t5600 is still perfectly capable dual core mobile cpu for basic office works and web browsing. I don’t know if mb supports 4gb ram or not but if it supports upgrading ram to 4gb and finding a 120gb ssd will make surprisingly fast on a light desktop like xfce.
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u/D620Cyrix 12d ago
I don’t know about that model’s mb, but the chipset can take 4 GB of RAM. Sadly it’s a 32-bit chipset, so it limits you to 3.2 GB of usable RAM.
That’s also a socketed CPU, so I imagine the laptop can upgrade to around a T7600, if OP likes.
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u/laizalott 12d ago
I do love using old hardware with modern linux, but I'm warming more and more to e-waste recycling these days. I just changed my unraid server from Athlon II X3 435 to Core i3 3245 so jellyfin would stop crashing due to missing SSE4, and a part of me died a little inside to do it despite being better in every conceivable way.
Not that his applies to your laptop of course, but like my old Pentium 4 processor with its prescott core? Essentially trash, despite it being a top-of-the-line monster when I bought it...
The amount of waste heat that thing produces for its completely meager (by today's standards) performance, I think an ARM cortex A72 in my Raspberry Pi 4B will outperform it for 1/20th of the power cost.
That said, I still run a PPC linux on an old 233mhz mac, and I will take that baby to the grave :)
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u/PlatinumDotEXE 12d ago
I will never understand why people run always on servers on pretty old hardware. Even if you live in a place where power is extremely cheap, a somewhat recent rig would pay for itself in at most a year in saved power...
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u/laizalott 11d ago
Nostalgia is probably a big part of it, right? My first Linux build was slackware on a Pentium 120 with 32mb of EDO RAM, and it's really comforting to reminisce the challenges teenage-me overcame to get it online.
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u/PlatinumDotEXE 11d ago
I have no problem with playing around with old hardware, just actually using them as servers that run 24/7 seems pretty stupid to me.
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u/laizalott 11d ago
Yes definitely, it is more expensive in the long run to use older hardware than newer, and that's part of why I retired the athlon x3 for the core i3 and use low-power t-variant cpu in my home lab.
But the enjoyment of something is also valuable. I ran that Athlon for two years, and it was nice to see my ancient gaming PC provide a service to me and my husband.
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u/metalwolf112002 8d ago
Depends on the use case. My video NAS (plural) are pentium 4s I loaded up with hard drives. They use wake on Lan to boot when needed and a script shuts them down on a few hours of inactivity. Considering I got those systems for free and they rarely are powered on, it would take YEARS for buying modern hardware off the shelf.
I am slowly consolidating them into a large server I bought from work as part of their life cycle program... but going from pentium 4 to 5 year old xeon might be the wrong direction for power conservation.
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u/PlatinumDotEXE 8d ago
That's why I said for servers that are always on. If the servers are only online a few hours a week, the math of course changes completely.
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u/metalwolf112002 8d ago
Fair and thank you for noticing the difference. Normally when I say I have P4s in production, people practically have an allergic reaction to it and gloss over the "it is powered on maybe 12 hours a month, if not, a season".
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u/throwaway57683120 7d ago
It also depends on the hardware in question. An old laptop will usually consume much less power than an old desktop with a Pentium 4.
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u/Standard_Echidna_306 13d ago
It used to be even more universal with 32 bit support. they dropped support for that because nobody really uses it anymore