I love old computers, but I also admit that there is a reason that we’ve all moved on to newer machines. This challenge may make us all appreciate our new hardware a bit more.
The biggest issue I see with this (for most of us) would be the RAM limit. The article did say that more RAM was “okay,” so perhaps this would be doable. The primary roadblocks in my case would be communication tools and websites required for work (JIRA, Slack). There is a JIRA cli tool I found on github, and a cli client for Slack. I could probably get those running in Cygwin on Win2K or WinXP. KMeleon is still around with a Goanna version, so I may be able to get the rest of my web needs met. Email is email, so no worries. An older version of Notepad++ could serve as my IDE, but maybe something like Scintilla or even JOE on Cygwin would be better. I may do it… the question is, do I got for early AMD64, a p3 or p4, or do I really punish myself and go back to a p1 with win98 and kernelex?
For those curious, I wouldn’t actually recommend trying Linux on an older machine unless you’re willing to custom compile your system. I do a lot of retro computing, and modern Linux is just kind of big. You can make it smaller, and there are distributions custom built for the purpose, but they do not (in my experience) deliver the kind of performance that vintage OSs do on vintage hardware. If anyone knows of projects that do, please let me know!
The biggest issue I see with this (for most of us) would be the RAM limit. The article did say that more RAM was “okay,” so perhaps this would be doable. The primary roadblocks in my case would be communication tools and websites required for work (JIRA, Slack). There is a JIRA cli tool I found on github, and a cli client for Slack. I could probably get those running in Cygwin on Win2K or WinXP. KMeleon is still around with a Goanna version, so I may be able to get the rest of my web needs met. Email is email, so no worries. An older version of Notepad++ could serve as my IDE, but maybe something like Scintilla or even JOE on Cygwin would be better. I may do it… the question is, do I got for early AMD64, a p3 or p4, or do I really punish myself and go back to a p1 with win98 and kernelex?
For those curious, I wouldn’t actually recommend trying Linux on an older machine unless you’re willing to custom compile your system. I do a lot of retro computing, and modern Linux is just kind of big. You can make it smaller, and there are distributions custom built for the purpose, but they do not (in my experience) deliver the kind of performance that vintage OSs do on vintage hardware. If anyone knows of projects that do, please let me know!