Oldtober: Use an old computer during October

[plumpan]

The full write up is here but I'll give you the short version:

Find a computer that is "old" and try to use it as much as you can for daily tasks in October.

"Old" means around 10 years, specifically aiming for anything before Kaby Lake, Zen, Pascal, and Polaris, if you're a nerd and those names mean anything to you.

Yes, you probably want to use Linux. Or BSD.

I'm not really calling this a "challenge" because it's not one, it's just a fun thing to try out. Maybe you do it for a week and hate it, you really think you should say you "failed"? You probably still learned some things, that's time well spent.

I plan on giving my T420 a bit of a dust off and seeing how well it holds up now. If I'm feeling extra spicy I may smack a spinny drive in it instead of an SSD.

[Flutter_Batty]

Hmm... I could probably dust off this laptop from '09. It runs Windows, and I used it a long time ago to play my games from home over the internet. Currently, it's taken offline and only used to play CDs and DVDs. Might wanna consider reformatting it and put Linux on it. I however don't know much of Linux and would probably do well with some pointers.

[plumpan]

Everyone's Linux advice is different but I think MX Linux is a good place to start. Their default XFCE version should run well on anything recent and be fully featured, plus MX has a lot of graphical front ends for things that might otherwise be command line tasks. It still takes a bit of learning to figure out what everything is called though.

Only hitch in that is they are probably going to release a new major version in October, which shouldn't change much but that's just a thing going on.

They also have a 32 bit Fluxbox version I'd love to try on some older (20+ year) machines. Haven't messed with it yet.

[Keys]

Sounds like a fun thing to do, was just joking with friends that we could all use Vista for the "fun" of it since all we play games-wise is like a doom mod (srb2kart), TF2, and Worms Armageddon that shouldn't have any issue running on it.

I think my work would have issues with me doing this though, since they provide a machine with heaps of corporate spyware that we're technically not allowed to turn off

[beeps]

Oh jeez, to think my 2016 MacBook Pro is almost old enough to qualify.

Also not something I think I could practically do, given most of my time during the month is on a work-issued computer.