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I finally found the time this year to replace my parents' old T-series Thinkpad Windows 8 with Linux Mint. I also upgraded the hard drive to an SSD. The result
by p2detar 19d ago
I finally found the time this year to replace my parents' old T-series Thinkpad Windows 8 with Linux Mint. I also upgraded the hard drive to an SSD. The result - a 15 years old machine i5 Dual Core with 6GB RAM now boots and works extremely fast as compared to before. Also with USB and wireless mouse support out of the box - I didn't have to touch anything.
Sorry, if this offends anyone, but Windows (non-Server editions) is a junk OS that I never ever want to see or use again.
- xxs 19d agoeven finds network printers on its own
- cpa 19d agoIn my experience, unfortunately it’s fast until you need to use a webapp (Gmail, FB, Netflix…). For document editing or code it’s pretty awesome but a sluggish web is a deal breaker for many these days.
- dijit 19d agoI've had some experiences like that, mostly when Spectre/Meltdown were new. (or if I had a dGPU which didn't have good drivers - or.. if there's no hardware acceleration for smooth scroll for some other reason, like chrome on ARM for a long time). I agree that it's a dealbreaker, and the circumstances in which it can happen are opaque and difficult to troubleshoot. Luckily these days with anything released since 2020- it's a lot better. Linux still struggles a lot with JS runtimes on Skylake. While I am throwing Linux under the bus a bit here, I am still perplexed that we use an exceptionally inefficient language as the major application delivery system of the modern day. We complain that it uses a lot of RAM and is slow, but if you consider what javascript is compared to how CPUs think about things, it's a miracle we get what we get... we managed to get a marvel of engineering and the response has been to shove millions of lines of code through it... At some point, yeah, it's slow.
- brudgers 19d agoLuckily these days with anything released since 2020- it's a lot better. Unless it’s a post-Intel Mac, and that’s all of them these days.
- dijit 19d agoWebsites work better on a mac than ever. You mean Linux, probably, but thats because Chrome doesn't enable hardware acceleration pn ARM, so smooth scroll is disabled. Pretty rough.
- brudgers 19d agoI mean Linux because M silicon has no public documentation. And by Linux, I mean there’s no distribution that runs on a Mac better than a 1990’s consumer HP laptop did in the 1990’s. And that’s only for M1 and M2 silicon. Linux doesn’t run on M3 silicon and later at all.
- p2detar 19d agoThey mostly use Firefox on the laptop, like 95% of the time - FB, YouTube, GDrive, some web games. I also got them uBlock installed. No issues so far. Firefox works really fast. Memory pressure is low, even when watching YT videos, probably 1.5-2GB at most. I though 6GB won't be enough and installed zram, but honestly - the OS never touches the swap, at least when I tested it. Will check the state again in a couple of months.
- feelamee 19d ago> but a sluggish web is a deal breaker for many these days. are serious? web is sluggish anywhere... and this is a common "trend"
- Razengan 19d ago> Windows (non-Server editions) is a junk OS Some people realized this 25 years ago
- hosel 19d agoThe server editions are junk too, lol.
- bayindirh 19d agoYes, I'm offended, because you excluded Windows Server.
- p2detar 19d agoFair point, hehe. Well in all fairness, I do use it at work because of our customers, but other than that I'd never touch it.
- anon291 19d agoIt shouldn't be offensive. The assessment is accurate. I used to think computers 'degraded' and got slower and worse over time. It always seemed weird to me since logically, the silicon is there. However, when you run a proper operating system, there's no degradation. It's a software problem in its entirety. Nixos has kept my laptop running for almost a decade at this point with no performance degradation. I am only considering upgrading due to fundamental hardware constraints, but the machine itself is fine and still snappy.
- walrus01 19d agoIt's a fair point but capabilities do degrade relative to what is considered "ordinary every day use software" even if nothing is wrong with the OS. For instance there's a fair number of old laptops which exist now that can't play full screen 1080p content from youtube inside a browser without extensively dropping frames (way below a smooth 30 fps) because the cpu/video hardware has no support for hardware acceleration of the codecs in use. Even if the laptop has a 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 screen. Additionally they will struggle heavily with 100% CPU load doing something like running any video conference webRTC app (generally equivalent to google meet) in a browser tab. Complexity of features and more computationally intensive things will still obsolete an old system even if it's running an 'optimal' non windows OS.
- xp84 19d agoThat’s a good one. Codecs are one of the few excusable reasons to me. It’s fair that we have ever-more strenuous codecs because obviously every new generation of them has better quality per byte. What’s inexcusable is just that every application out there, web or Electron, the only two kinds that seem to exist anymore, is written with increasingly bloated stacks and layers of JavaScript. I’m pretty sure the system requirements needed for applications to run smoothly are scaling exactly in sync with the spec of the average software engineer’s (or PM’s) computer. For some reason, in 2012 something like Slack or Outlook or an IDE was exactly as performant on a PC with 8GB and 2 cores, as the current versions are today on a modern high-end machine with 32GB of RAM and 10 cores. Yet they do the same tasks. There haven’t been any big innovations in the calendar, or chat, or email - none that inherently require more hardware resources, at least.
- feelamee 19d agowould be interested to see comparison: 1. windows + hdd 2. windows + ssd 3. linux + ssd I know that Linux can greatly speed up startup, but more likely that ssd gave bigger impact.
- dijit 19d agoI think we spend a little bit too much time optimising startup time. Anything more than 3 seconds and less than 45 seconds is perceptibly the same, it's the same level of inconvenience unless you're in a rush. .. but I can't honestly tell you the last time I booted my Macbook from cold. Worthwhile suspend/resume is a much better goal for the modern computer user... Windows fucked us all with s2idle, including themselves.
- brudgers 19d agoOn Windows, Hibernate works a treat.
- upboundspiral 19d agoHybernate is basically cold booting. At least in my experience it's not comparable to suspend + resume in terms of speed.
- brudgers 19d agoI just opened my Thinkpad lid. I was back to where I left when I had counted to eleven. It’s about six years old, running W11, and was <$600 new. It has a touchscreen I never use.
- ChocolateGod 19d agoYep. Reliability > Speed. Whenever people complain systemd boots slow, it's because it's following the dependency graph set by the distro which focusses reliability over speed.
- xp84 19d ago
- handbanana_ 19d agoUpgrades to SSD, thinks the OS made it faster. Ok
- bayindirh 19d agoA bog standard Linux distribution boots under 30 seconds with a good HDD, assuming hardware initializes fast. SSD generally adds 3x to that speed due to access latency for small files. I remember pressing power button and leaving my PC alone to get a tea or something when I was booting my Windows installation which I had around for gaming. Same with an SSD. Desktop arrives faster, CPU still choked to launch whatever services are needed, fans are doubling as hair dryers. Both scenarios were on the same machine, BTW.
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- Tallain 19d agoThis just in: multiple factors can contribute to the same result. Shocking!
- okamiueru 19d ago> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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