on ssd upgrades:

upgrade usually costs less than 30 dollars for a 256GB SATA drive.

how much for the time machine to go back to last summer?

I have to laugh at the guide calling itself “complete.”

Yes, it’s got a lot of useful info. Yes, someone reading it can learn a lot about what to do with older computers and what to expect from distros.

But there is so much more that the guide doesn’t cover, haha

After a quick skim of the article, it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but the author 1. only worked with a single Intel CPU (no AMD devices at all) and 2. could do with a wider knowledge of niche distros.

There are four version of x86_64: v1, v2, v3, and v4.

RHEL 9 dropped support for anything prior to v3. That means RockyLinux doesn’t cover it, either. AlmaLinux has support for v2 in version 10, but there’s no way of knowing how long that will last.

Some binary packages are starting to drop support for earlier version. The latest numpy out of pip will not work on a v1 machine. You can sometimes use the system package manager’s numpy to work around it, or constrain pip to use an older numpy. I don’t know what else is lurking out there.

If you’ve got visions of taking a really old computer that you happened to max out on RAM back in the day and bringing it back to life there are surprises waiting for you.

I still have some fedora 6 discs floating around. those should be fine to use, right?

TCL runs fine on 192MB of RAM and a PII. But any modern webpage brings it all to a screeching halt.

Is ext4rat still a thing? That would be a nice tip for anyone running the system on hdds

I’d rather use Haiku on such horrible hardware if it’s hardware compatible and I had no other hardware choice. Newer computers can do things far more efficiently, and smart phones costing ~$100 are safer for banking and often more capable otherwise. People try to make Linux the solution to everything when it’s horrible for most things. -It’s cultish behavior.