>The honest assessment: If the machine cannot run a lightweight Linux desktop at a usable speed after you have applied the optimizations in this guide, it is time to recycle it responsibly. Most municipalities have e-waste collection programs. Do not throw it in the trash. The components contain recyclable metals and toxic materials that need proper handling.
This is the whole point.Linux helps in that judgement whether to keep or throw the box.
Honestly it comes down to what do you mean by using Linux. In 2026, or well at least since the mid 2010s, the biggest hurdle will be the web browser. Do you need that? If yes then you are already in the higher system requirement pool. If not then pretty much anything goes, like the options I mentioned above. And even then you can use curl, wget, aria2 etc to access online content to some extent
I use Pop_OS! on my old 2014 Macbook Pro (16 GB LPDDR3, i5-4278U with 4 cores). It runs superbly with Gnome3. Given that it is 12 years old now and the latest supported macOS version with opencore legacy patcher was stuttering and unusably slow, there is a second life now for the machine. I mostly use it as a headless home server, the built in battery serves as UPS, keyboard and trackpad make it easier to setup and debug things.
I changed the battery myself (50€ replacement from Amazon) and it looks as good as new (one benefit of the aluminum chassis and glass display is that they can be cleaned quite well). Hardware support from Linux for those intel machines is great nowadays: WiFi, Bluetooth, trackpad etc all work.
It's interesting how on a server 2 GiB of RAM can get you quite far, however on a desktop that's pretty much the minimum feasible amount. It used to be the opposite: servers needed plenty of RAM and CPU compared to desktops
My old laptop from 2006 has an ATI x1600. I remember that I lost v sync with kernels past 3.something so I had to put the kernel on hold while the other packages updated around it. That was around 2012. Maybe the issue is fixed by now but old graphic cards can make an old PC run only as a headless server. It's been years since I booted it.
And not a word about MGLRU and its settings. It has the biggest impact on performance on lower-end PCs, especially with low amount of RAM and slow HDD.
Here's a post from "le9" patch user which was created by ChromeOS developers much before MGLRU, but exploits the similar idea: keeping the essential file cache in RAM for as long as possible. It's usually night and day on low-end machines.
When I was a student mucking around the trashed corner of a retired hardware room, I found a very dusty box that looked promising. It was a Ross hyperstation.
I was able to install Arch Linux and Debian on it. But I think it had some corrupt RAM and would crash after a few days if lucky or hours if not. That was a pity. This was the first system where I could see 4 cpus and had got pretty excited. This was a time when there were rumours of Intel dual cores going around. I was planning to run it as our NFS file server.
I was able to bootstrap GCC on it too, after a few tries.
The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?
I had a similar experience trying to use an old laptop with 2GB of RAM. I was surprised how much it struggled with basic tasks. I remember my first computer with 32MB of RAM. Obviously we live in a different world now but still, it's not like I was trying to do anything more ambitious than what I used to do on that PC.
My first Linux PC was a 386DX-40 with 20 MB RAM and about 80 MB of HDD space.
I was able to run X Windows, Emacs, and gcc for university CS work. I had to use 8 bit psuedocolor graphics to have a decent sized desktop like 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (on a nice CRT).
But, I put it into a swapping frenzy by opening one JPEG that I had downloaded from an academic website. It was a high-resolution scan of some old manuscript, but probably lower pixel count than a typical smartphone photo from this decade.
Doing normal work also involved frequent swapping delays as you launched new programs and evicted old ones.
What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler.
Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?
You don't even have to go that old. There are so many companies that upgrade tiny pc's its created a whole self hosting community with the tiny lenovo, hp and dell unit's. It's not only Windows that can be replaced with old hardware but also many online services with proxmox for cloud/nas/dns/vpn/multimedia etc. Of course these are not 2GB systems but you can do some pretty cool things with 8 and 9 year old systems that are literally decommissioned because they are too old. Although a friend of mine who works for a MSP gave me a Lenovo m710q tiny a month ago and its made a pretty good Debian Desktop for my workbench in the garage. I lucked out there because even these tiny's are now going up in price. People have caught on.
I work at an ewaste recycling company. Since I started working there over a year ago, over half the micro/tiny desktops I've seen come in are 7th gen i5 at least. In fact, I was using a Dell Optiplex 7050 Micro until about a month ago.
They could make so much money selling them. I hope they do. I bought a M920 tiny Lenovo with 32GB of RAM and an i5-8500. Stuck a 2TB NVME (when they were reasonable) and the whole thing cost me like $400. It's a proxmox workhorse and a couple of years later I can probably get more than double what I paid for it.
Great post. I just revived an old PC as well that was gathering dust by installing Linux on it. Also upgraded the hardware from a i3-6100 using iGPU + 8GB RAM to:
- i5-6600K (€20 used)
- ASUS STRIX RX 480 8GB (€20 used)
- 16GB DDR4 (€50 used)
€90 all in for an incredible Linux machine that still runs games great at 1080p. Probably even that amount of RAM was overkill, but it's 3200Mhz instead of the old 2133Mhz.
Slackware and Hyperbola GNU/Linux still run fast. Just pick XFCE instead of KDE under Slackware.
Deselect KDE if you don't need it. If the machine is old, it's better
to use XFCE and install the rest later.
If you install and setup slapt-get you might install some nice KDE/Plasma software later
to run under KDE. Then you can set the QT5 theme to GTK2 under /etc/profile.d/qt.sh (chmod +x it)
and this content:
export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2
Slackware is not 100% free but you can compile a libre kernel from FSFLA with ease and drop it into the UEFI partition or /boot and run the required grub/lilo/elilo command later.
> They are slow because Windows got heavier while the hardware stayed the same.
That is not true. They are slow, because ALL software got better and more advanced and that is not only the operating system. It always makes me mad when people say that macOS is so optimized you can do more than on windows.
No. Old hardware not having a hardware decoder for modern youtube videos won't play them.
Modern webpages full of interactive realtime features won't fit in the RAM or will be bottlecked by a cpu.
Yes, the modern linux will run, but are you going to do anything more than opening a notepad or old software? No. You are not going to use modern web apps or software on it.
Is it okay? Yes. Optimizing for old hardware is EXPENSIVE. Just move on.
I’ve got a 15 year old workstation that I’m breathing new life into, but fortunately starting from a higher baseline. 24GB of RAM is going to 96GB, and it turns out it should be able to use an NVMe drive, so have a card and an M2 drive on the way. The annoying thing is that the GTX 460 is no longer supported by the Nvidia driver so I’m back to nouveau. That might get replaced with something more modern. I had an old Mint installed and decided to blow it away with stock Debian, and Claude’s setting up nix VMs for itself to run in. It has been crazy how $4k in 2011 for an SR-2 system has yielded a long productive life for this box.
50 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] threadThis is the whole point.Linux helps in that judgement whether to keep or throw the box.
0, http://www.tinycorelinux.net/
1, https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
Honestly it comes down to what do you mean by using Linux. In 2026, or well at least since the mid 2010s, the biggest hurdle will be the web browser. Do you need that? If yes then you are already in the higher system requirement pool. If not then pretty much anything goes, like the options I mentioned above. And even then you can use curl, wget, aria2 etc to access online content to some extent
I changed the battery myself (50€ replacement from Amazon) and it looks as good as new (one benefit of the aluminum chassis and glass display is that they can be cleaned quite well). Hardware support from Linux for those intel machines is great nowadays: WiFi, Bluetooth, trackpad etc all work.
My old laptop from 2006 has an ATI x1600. I remember that I lost v sync with kernels past 3.something so I had to put the kernel on hold while the other packages updated around it. That was around 2012. Maybe the issue is fixed by now but old graphic cards can make an old PC run only as a headless server. It's been years since I booted it.
Linux is still awkward when it comes to "OOM", the output of df -h is not accurate
Here's a post from "le9" patch user which was created by ChromeOS developers much before MGLRU, but exploits the similar idea: keeping the essential file cache in RAM for as long as possible. It's usually night and day on low-end machines.
When I was a student mucking around the trashed corner of a retired hardware room, I found a very dusty box that looked promising. It was a Ross hyperstation.
I was able to install Arch Linux and Debian on it. But I think it had some corrupt RAM and would crash after a few days if lucky or hours if not. That was a pity. This was the first system where I could see 4 cpus and had got pretty excited. This was a time when there were rumours of Intel dual cores going around. I was planning to run it as our NFS file server.
I was able to bootstrap GCC on it too, after a few tries.
I was able to run X Windows, Emacs, and gcc for university CS work. I had to use 8 bit psuedocolor graphics to have a decent sized desktop like 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (on a nice CRT).
But, I put it into a swapping frenzy by opening one JPEG that I had downloaded from an academic website. It was a high-resolution scan of some old manuscript, but probably lower pixel count than a typical smartphone photo from this decade.
Doing normal work also involved frequent swapping delays as you launched new programs and evicted old ones.
Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?
- i5-6600K (€20 used)
- ASUS STRIX RX 480 8GB (€20 used)
- 16GB DDR4 (€50 used)
€90 all in for an incredible Linux machine that still runs games great at 1080p. Probably even that amount of RAM was overkill, but it's 3200Mhz instead of the old 2133Mhz.
Deselect KDE if you don't need it. If the machine is old, it's better to use XFCE and install the rest later.
If you install and setup slapt-get you might install some nice KDE/Plasma software later to run under KDE. Then you can set the QT5 theme to GTK2 under /etc/profile.d/qt.sh (chmod +x it) and this content:
Slackware is not 100% free but you can compile a libre kernel from FSFLA with ease and drop it into the UEFI partition or /boot and run the required grub/lilo/elilo command later.That is not true. They are slow, because ALL software got better and more advanced and that is not only the operating system. It always makes me mad when people say that macOS is so optimized you can do more than on windows.
No. Old hardware not having a hardware decoder for modern youtube videos won't play them.
Modern webpages full of interactive realtime features won't fit in the RAM or will be bottlecked by a cpu. Yes, the modern linux will run, but are you going to do anything more than opening a notepad or old software? No. You are not going to use modern web apps or software on it.
Is it okay? Yes. Optimizing for old hardware is EXPENSIVE. Just move on.
I prefer Boron over the more recent Carbon due to some of the panel changes (although presumably this is all configurable somewhere)
https://ddl.bunsenlabs.org/ddl/
Boron also probably requires this fix:
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?pid=144667