> installing any even remotely current release of Debian (or any other
> kind of *nix) on hardware over a decade old probably doesn't have much
> practical benefit, and is more of an exercise in seeing
> what's possible.
Hmm... FWIW, here are the computers I use on a regular basis:
- Thinkpad X30 (2003) 1¼GB of RAM.
- Thinkpad T61 (2007) 8GB RAM.
- Thin-ITX with i3-4170 (2015) 16GB RAM.
- Libre mini (2020) 24GB RAM.
They all run the latest Debian (half testing, half stable).
Of those, I'd definitely agree that the Thinkpad X30 is "an exercise in
seeing what's possible". I use it exclusively to display PDFs on the
classroom's projector. Using Firefox on it is excruciating. Emacs and
Evince work OK, OTOH. I use it mostly because back when I got this
machine, I would have laughed at the idea that it would still be usable
ten years later (let alone 20), and I have fun getting students to guess
its age. I didn't expect that the end of Dennard scaling (and Moore's
law) would hit so hard.
I don't see a big difference among the other 3 machines in my everyday
use of them, OTOH. So, the "decade old" Thin-ITX is still about as good
as a new machine for my use-case (mostly software development) and that
also holds for the 18 years old laptop.
FWIW, I tried a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 (2017) as a replacement for my
old T61, and while it does come with some notable improvements (longer
battery life, much lighter, much smaller pixels), it wasn't terribly
faster, and it suffered from a shorter screen, so in the end I just keep
using the T61.
YMMV, of course (e.g. if your use case depends on the use of GPUs), but
for many common usage scenarios, using "hardware over a decade old"
still makes perfect sense and doesn't take any more effort than using
brand new hardware.
IMO the "threshold" beyond which machines are too old to be useful
(i.e. they fall into the retrocomputing sport category) is somewhere
around 2007, which is also approximately the end of Dennard scaling.
Stefan
