Old Computer Challenge 2024

2024-07-13

A while ago I came across the old computer challenge on Mastodon and it immediately resonated with me. So here I am finishing setting up an old computer for personal use for a week (and likely longer than that).

Hardware

I no longer have my first computer (a Pentium 2 from the late '90) nor my first laptop (a 2005-era Acer, bought when I started university). Both would have been great candidates for the challenge.

I still have around a mid 2009 MacBook Pro and a Raspberry Pi model B (bought in 2014), both of which qualify as old computers to me. The specs of the Raspberry Pi are more in line with the original challenge but this year I'm going to use the MacBook. My goal is to show that such an old machine can still be useful. Not fast, not for all the workloads but it still can do something when paired with the right software.

The MacBook has a Core 2 Duo, 8GB of RAM and a spinning disk. I don't expect my workload (mostly surfing the web and tex-based communications) to be CPU constrained. The amount of RAM I have is plenty. They still sell computers with 8GB of RAM in 2024! A SSD would be a nice upgrade but then this wouldn't even be a challenge.

I'm not going to use this computer for work. First because I can't just show up with my device and use it. Moreover, the software I need doesn't run on this machine. Even if I could make it work somehow I don't think this machine would fare well with compiling lots of software and many WebEx calls.

Software

When it comes to software for old machines there are two choices: using the original OS (or an era appropriate one) for an old machine experience or using a modern OS. I choose the latter to make sure I have a system with security updates and also to still be able to easily find the software I need. The requirement to have a modern operating system rules out macOS, which stopped supporting that computer ages ago, and leaves me with Linux. Having a 64 bit Intel machine makes my life really easy compared to using older machines.

I'm running NixOS with a configuration pretty much identical to what I have in the "development LXC" in my homelab. The notable difference is that here I have a windows manager (I choose Sway) and can run graphical applications. With everything configured exactly the same and Atuin and Syncthing synchronising shell history and files I easily feel at home in my old computer. I also joined my tailnet so I can access everything I need.

I usually say that all I need is a browser and a terminal. Let's see if this challenge proves it to be true. This is the software I have installed so far:

Let's see if all of this can get me through the week. I've been using this system for a while after I prepared it for the challenge and so far I haven't had any major complaints. It's not fast but definitely usable.

By the way, this post has been edited on my old computer. I also pushed the changed to the git server from there. I can already add "writing and publishing a post" to the list of things this machine can do.