Paul wrote:
Mike Easter wrote:

I guess my point in an XP group, not a linux one, is that we should
use our old hardware 'very carefully' and linux is a useful solution,
but old Win OSes have a place.

I also have a Vista-era laptop w/ 2008 bios, 2G w/ 64bit 800 MHz AMD
cpu.Â* It can run lean v of Win7 and of course various linux.

But the Linux ecosystem, has not put a priority on saving old
equipment.

Well... the linux ecosystem is made up of developers a few fairly large
and a lot definitely very small/limited who go off in numerous
directions to scratch their own itch, usually as opposed to having any
'priority'. But, there are 'enough' developers who are focusing on
'light enough' OSes for light (but adequate) hardware. Raspbian and
others for RPi/s come to mind. There are still a few 32bit distros
available, but waning.

The reliance on the video card shaders for slick graphics, means
that the mainstream distros are no good on old hardware.

Yeah; I would say you are correct there. However, your 'mainstream'
term may be hard to define, as 'non-mainstream' distros such as MX Linux
have a significant page hit popularity at DistroWatch.

Yes, you can find Lubuntu or Xubuntu or other lightweight
ones, but the erosion with time tells you what will
eventually happen to those.

Well, the 'buntu business isn't exactly 'light', so you need to get
'down' to Debian or Arch or other base and use a very light DE or mix
some light DE parts w/ a DE-like Window Manager.

It's a slippery slope, where before you know it,
all that's left is Puppy or FatDog.

And even the 'main' thrust of some puppy developers is in the 'buntu (or
slackware) base direction. Barry himself is doing some other things now
w/ his Easy OS and his idea of 'containers'.

You know, I was watching a Command Prompt window in Windows 10
running, and I had used " | tee output.txt " so I could
watch the progress of a bash shell I was running. And
I glanced over at the Task Manager and it said of
my high-end graphics card, that right at that moment,
I was using "14% of 3D capacity". The text scrolling
on the screen, was using shaders! Now, how sick is *that* ?

I don't know how to comment on that, except to 'deviate' from the thrust
of your tale to say that I think MS is doing a smart thing by giving its
developers access to a real command terminal functionality.

I call this "SmartPhone disease", because smartphones
are a "leader" on how to waste resources. When this
trend hits your legacy equipment, well basically
there are no functional shaders, and everything
has to be "emulated" on the "gutless" processor.

What's not to like ?

Back to my position that we have to use our legacy hardware 'wisely'
which includes not trying to use the wrong kind of software on it.

This is the main reason we can't have nice things.

And when you use 14% of my video card, it means
you're also using 14% of 180W or 25W of electricity,
just to watch text scroll. There was a time, when
a VIA chip could have a 2W GPU in the Northbridge,
and the text would scroll just as fast... This
is progress ???

The little RPi is so 'economical' in juice consumption that it doesn't
even come w/ a power switch. Since I wanted one, I had to get a little
'plug switch' for the connection to the main.

If we moev forward 50 years, I would guess that
scrolling text would draw a solid kilowatt.
By extrapolation. Maybe we could use real time
ray tracing or something.

Heh.

I think I'll tell another weak hardware tale (and mention XP).

I guess my oldest 2006 1G ram XP machine isn't actually the weakest
device I use to connect, in term of ram.

I have a clamshell/fliptop ZTE phone whose OS is allegedly 'some kind of
linux' as opposed to android in an older so-called 'feature' device
which has .5G ram w/ 1.1 GHz Qualcomm (Snapdragon 210 MSM8909 - quadcore
arms) cpu; but/while my no-plan BLU phone has 1G ram w/ cpu 1.3 GHz
MediaTek 6580 (also quadcore arm) w/ Android 6.0 OS; and my RPi is 1G
ram and .6 GHz ARM on Raspbian 9.

About that connectivity...

The zte has a tracfone basic plan which is used rarely; the blu just
connects by wifi as does the RPi. I have other 'cell phone' type
connectivity via googlevoice over various newer (not as old) and the old
computers cable connected. Most of my phone comm is via old home
landline cordless phones over VoIP, not cell towers.


--
Mike Easter