Gregory's Server@sjmulder I've been screaming this at anyone that would listen for years, and everyone tells me I'm crazy. I remember having a single threaded 486 with 32 megs of RAM that was more responsive than my Windows 11 work computer that has a top end zillion core Xeon and 64 gigs of RAM.
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31 comments
@howtophil FreeDOS is just a different level! What saddens me is that every few years even Linux gets less and less useful. A Latitude laptop that runs XP super well can barely handle any window manager featuring a task bar. I do long for the days of FVWM95 AntiX is very usable and fairly "modern" so you might want to check out that distro. I am not a fan of the kernel folks "retiring" "old architecture" Linux should still blaze on a 386 and should have /expanded/ to run in some way on 8088/8086/286/etc (semi-RIP ELKS) @howtophil I'll try it! Wrt pre-Pentium machines, it's cool that the 486 is still supported by NetBSD but it requires a good amount of RAM. @sjmulder That's when I start looking at FreeDOS and a totally legit copy of GeoWorks I have (set the filesystem type to os2 in the geoworks conf after install)  @howtophil @sjmulder i've still got antiX on this 2007 EeePC and it feels no different than when i first started using antiX on it back in however long it was ago now
with only one major, tragic exception: web browsing @sjmulder @howtophil this makes me think of how useful my Commodore Amiga was back in the pre-web 90's. @markjustmark @sjmulder My middle-school had Geoworks on some PCs and moving to HS with Windows felt like a step back. "What do you mean no autosave? What about when the power goes out???" @markjustmark @sjmulder @howtophil In my first year at Uni, I could work in Turbo Pascal running on a DOS emulator on my A500 with a Norton SI score of 0.2 :) All off floppy disks, couldn't afford the HD  @howtophil @sjmulder 8086? No MMU, 1MB max addressable memory? You could run Minix on that, but don't expect much. @sjmulder I also tend to use "Ubuntu Mate" (Lubuntu before) which cuts out a lot of cruft.  @howtophil @sjmulder On all my personal machines I run elementary OS ( @elementary ) and it runs like a top. @benpocalypse @sjmulder @elementary The docker at the bottom is a hard no for me. Not my UI of choice. I like a nice bar with icons, desktop pager, window taskbar, and menus on it  @sjmulder @howtophil With XFCE window manager and no other "desktop environment" components loaded, it does fine. There's a lot of garbage in mainstream desktop-oriented distros but you can just... not use it. Which is not possible at all on most other systems. @howtophil @dalias @sjmulder very true, my father uses my 13 year old Dell XPS with Lubuntu and it runs fast enough for me to not get annoyed.   @sjmulder @howtophil Yeah, this bugs me too. I've got an incredibly old netbook that i use to write while travelling, and it's becoming more and more of a challenge to find a distro that runs well on it. @ubergeek @sjmulder @howtophil I saw a recommendation for that elsewhere in the replies! Definitely one to check out next time my current setup breaks down (or I shell out for a very cheap SSD to swap in and give it a go).  @sjmulder @howtophil I think Linux "bloat" is manageable. Take antix, for example. Runs just fine on an old 32 bit netbook. It takes some work to trim it up, or to build minimally from the ground up, but it can be done because it's FLOSS. Not saying it's a solved problem, but that it can be a solved problem. @benpocalypse yes it's infuriating! I have a Pentium III sitting right here rocking Windows 2000 with Visual C++6 and it flies. Meanwhile in the clockapp people are condescendingly gaslighting me about presumed rose tinted glasses. @benpocalypse @sjmulder I will never forget typing "cc hello.c" on the 8MHz 8086-based Altos 586 and seeing the shell prompt come instantly back. I thought it had done nothing, but a.out was there, after running 2 compiler passes, assembler and linker. "/bin/cat" was just 238 bytes, and stdio was a shared lib  @benpocalypse @sjmulder When that 486 was still current, I remember tech journalists moaning that "Electric Pencil" on 8-bit machines could react faster than they could type, but MS Word on a 486 was becoming excruciating. Plus ça change... My favorite time was when every single program in Windows was huge and bulky, and then along came the smartphones and installing something on the smartphone took maybe only one or two megs, and then you wonder, what is wrong with Windows programs?  @benpocalypse @sjmulder Andy and Bill's law is alive and well: "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away". |
@benpocalypse @sjmulder
It's fun to take a "modern" computer and install FreeDOS, AntiX, etc on it and see it completely hit "Warp speed"