On 5/8/25 7:05 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
While that's obviously good, that doesn't necessarily justify buying a new machine from an ecological perspective: AFAIK the embedded energy in a laptop (i.e. the energy that was necessary to produce the laptop) is typically higher than all the electricity that the laptop will consume during its lifetime.
Indeed. Which is why I'm not in the habit of discarding functioning automobiles, cell phones, or computers.
And why I built myself a DOS/Ubuntu (mostly DOS) dual-boot out of mostly junk parts from the office boneyard (with the boss's blessing), including a motherboard just old enough to support two physical floppy drives. And why I went to enormous lengths to find a notebook old enough to run DOS and DOSapps well, after the last of my Compaq Conturas failed.
As I recall, somebody else in the thread suggested that your antique hardware would be happier as a DOSbox (i.e., a *physical* DOSbox, not a WinDoze or Linux box running a DOSBox emulator). I concur. Although such things are *not* just for running old games; they're equally good for running stuff like pre-Corel versions of WordPerfect and Xerox Ventura Publisher.
As I recall, my DOS/Ubuntu dual boot is something like about Pentium II class, give or take a generation and it's rather slow under Linux (specifically Ubuntu Hardy Heron). Much slower than the Linux subsystem of my Chromebook. So you can almost certainly find a Debian release that will run, but you might not be happy with response time.
-- JHHL
