I had to accept a few years back that my venerable eeePC 1000 netbook with it’s single core (2 threads!) Atom CPU is just not useful any longer, even with the most lightweight distro.
I’ll never let that particular machine go though, because it means a lot to me. I bought it with my first paycheck from my first job after university, and the year after (as the only portable machine I owned) it saw me through a whole year working abroad. Managed everything from Skype calls with my parents to browsing the Internet and watching YouTube, and that was running Windows!
Trying to do something with it now is just a reminder of how outrageously bloated and resource-heavy modern apps have become, especially those that are just electron web wrappers. And the web itself is exponentially more demanding to render.
It’s not your fault little eee, you’re just the same as ever. It’s the world that changed.
I suppose I could use it as an IRC terminal or something, that would be pretty hipster. But I’d just be wasting electricity.
That brings back memories. I had an eeePC back in the day also! A fine little portable machine in it’s time. But yes, time passed it by. I’ve got 2 old 16" laptops sitting on a shelf that no longer power on at all. And 2 old Chrome books that still light up. I should really do something with those I suppose.
My current fascination is mini desktops. I have an N100 mini with 8gigs of shared memory. It came with Win10 on it but that only lasted until I wiped it and did a bit distro surfing before settling on Fedora 41 Cinnamon. As a student/lite office machine that only cost me $90US from amazon, (I had an unused HDMI monitor), it’s amazingly sturdy to use. I want a bit better one now…
I started my Linux journey as a poor high school college student and while I got hand-me-down windows machines at home, I worried about breaking them fiddling with things beyond my knowledge level. A budget basement eeePC became my workbench and I started tinkering. I had to drive to the next city to find one in stock. Today the gas would cost more than the computer. :-D
I’d still be running the eee but it got put in the closet when many distros dropped 32 bit support.
But these days I have actual servers to do server things (2x HP Gen 8 Microservers which I saved from e-waste) so my little eee is kept only for love and nostalgia.
My problem is that because of Linux I can almost never throw away an old computer. I’ve got a bloody netbook around here somewhere running Lubuntu.
I had to accept a few years back that my venerable eeePC 1000 netbook with it’s single core (2 threads!) Atom CPU is just not useful any longer, even with the most lightweight distro.
I’ll never let that particular machine go though, because it means a lot to me. I bought it with my first paycheck from my first job after university, and the year after (as the only portable machine I owned) it saw me through a whole year working abroad. Managed everything from Skype calls with my parents to browsing the Internet and watching YouTube, and that was running Windows!
Trying to do something with it now is just a reminder of how outrageously bloated and resource-heavy modern apps have become, especially those that are just electron web wrappers. And the web itself is exponentially more demanding to render.
It’s not your fault little eee, you’re just the same as ever. It’s the world that changed.
I suppose I could use it as an IRC terminal or something, that would be pretty hipster. But I’d just be wasting electricity.
They are bloody spectacular for programming arduino or flashing your 3D printer.
That brings back memories. I had an eeePC back in the day also! A fine little portable machine in it’s time. But yes, time passed it by. I’ve got 2 old 16" laptops sitting on a shelf that no longer power on at all. And 2 old Chrome books that still light up. I should really do something with those I suppose.
My current fascination is mini desktops. I have an N100 mini with 8gigs of shared memory. It came with Win10 on it but that only lasted until I wiped it and did a bit distro surfing before settling on Fedora 41 Cinnamon. As a student/lite office machine that only cost me $90US from amazon, (I had an unused HDMI monitor), it’s amazingly sturdy to use. I want a bit better one now…
I started my Linux journey as a poor high school college student and while I got hand-me-down windows machines at home, I worried about breaking them fiddling with things beyond my knowledge level. A budget basement eeePC became my workbench and I started tinkering. I had to drive to the next city to find one in stock. Today the gas would cost more than the computer. :-D
I’d still be running the eee but it got put in the closet when many distros dropped 32 bit support.
Could set it up as a fileserver
I could :)
But these days I have actual servers to do server things (2x HP Gen 8 Microservers which I saved from e-waste) so my little eee is kept only for love and nostalgia.