this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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I have an old ThinkPad SL-400 with a Core 2 Duo processor and 4 gigabytes of RAM.

I used to think it was completely useless and it ended up gathering dust for years.

But recently, my sister started learning to code, and I decided to give her this laptop.

So I installed Debian 12 with the KDE desktop, and to my surprise it handles things surprisingly well. I didn't even feel the need to install something lighter like LXDE or XFCE.

It's amazing how well it multitasks with only 4 gigabytes of RAM. Just to test its limits, I opened vscode, multiple tabs in Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox all at once (including a YouTube video). I even opened Shotcut and edited a video while the browsers were running. Sure, it's not the fastest system I've ever seen, but it seems impossible to make it hang or freeze.

I'm using the Xanmod kernel and zswap, which might be helping to squeeze out more performance from this machine.

Overall it's amazing that to see how linux can breathe life into older hardware. I hope more people knew this and could save mony while using the latest software.

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[–] johan@feddit.nl 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

That's great! Glad it's working out.

One thing made me chuckle though:

with only 4 gigabytes of RAM

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads of RAM?

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 44 points 1 year ago

It's an inconceivably large amount of memory and also nothing. It really depends on your perspective.

Gaming PC? Doesn't even qualify because we need the space for those graphics. A wireless router? Huge. Definitely overkill.

Memory is pretty cheap these days but what constitutes a large amount of it depends on the job. Because I mainly do embedded development where memory is measured in 4k pages most everything seems like a lot.

[–] fratermus@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads or RAM?

First stick I bought was 1MB of SIPP, used, for $50.

"When I was a boy we had to load HIMEM and EMM386 uphill in the snow"

[–] hiddengoat@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

HIMEM? What newfangled shit is that?

Really though, I do NOT miss the days of having a custom boot disk for every single game.

[–] this_is_router@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

we had a paper with a bunch of Ys and Ns, so we could go through the autoexec.bat and config.sys step by step and decide which library to load into highmem or lowmem

[–] rotopenguin@infosec.pub 4 points 1 year ago

My first was a 512KB sidecar.

[–] clutch@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

4Gb is not much under Windows 11 and running Chrome

[–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads of RAM?

I remember upgrading my Atari STe to 4MB (yes MB) of RAM and thinking "I'll never use that much". Now I have 32GB and I probably will use it.

[–] GustavoM@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

It used to be a lot back then. Right now? Not really.

t. Got a Orange pi zero 3 w/ 1 GiB of ram and the performance is really great.

[–] Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I remember when my big Christmas present was an extra 16MB of RAM

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Consider enabling multigenerational LRU if you want the page reclaim strategy used on Android. It will stretch your RAM even more ridiculously far.

You've got the compression. That's great. Now, you can be more intelligent about which pages to compress also.

[–] mfat@lemdro.id 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks just skimmed through the documentation and it seems very interesting.

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

Same with a 2010-11 samsung. W10 made it totally unusable. linux has it peppy for web, and other office tasks, runs zoom calls as good as my new laptop

[–] mfat@lemdro.id 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah my smartphone has 12GB of ram :)

[–] roo@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had the same outcome with my HP 2 in 1, with one minor problem. I have to log in via keyboard because there's no virtual keyboard option for the log in with the Fedora distro I used.

[–] mfat@lemdro.id 1 points 1 year ago

Could you install one from the repos?

[–] Sephtis-6@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have the same lenovo and it indeed seems impossible what it can do. I installed linux on it so my mother could use it and I was blown away by the performance

[–] mfat@lemdro.id 1 points 1 year ago

That's great. Glad we didn't get read of them :)