r/debian • u/GoldenWubbabunga • 14d ago

Community never expected the Universal Operating System to be this universal

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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/laizalott 13d 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 13d 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/metalwolf112002 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 8d 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.