Thanks for sharing your experience.
Also, appreciate the intro to Haiku OS, I had not heard of it earlier. It is interesting to read their philosophy through their FAQs.
Comment on Using vintage laptops in 2024: How do you make it work?
jaredj@infosec.pub 3 months ago
I’ve got a Thinkpad 600X (Pentium III, 256MB RAM). I put Debian 12 on it, and the OS is not quite small enough. (NetBSD couldn’t drive my particular CardBus Wifi card, sadly, and 9front couldn’t drive the NeoMagic video properly.) Just Emacs on the console, no X, and eww for web browsing (to your question) and elpher for poking around Gemini. I’m not familiar enough with Thinkpads to know if that’s a useful data point for you.
Nobody’s mentioned www.haiku-os.org yet, so I will. I can’t remember what happened with it on my Thinkpad. There are several graphical browsers there, with a range of capabilities, as well as a port of Emacs.
I guess my real answer is: don’t handle today’s internet with all of its heavy websites? Use the web for documents, and use native applications rather than web apps for other purposes, such as chatting and email.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Also, appreciate the intro to Haiku OS, I had not heard of it earlier. It is interesting to read their philosophy through their FAQs.
www24@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Out of curiosity, do you use that Pentium III machine to access Lemm.ee? I used a Pentium 4 up until 2017 and some websites (probably due to heavy JS) would make the browsing experience fairly miserable.
jaredj@infosec.pub 3 months ago
No, I have not tried that. But I might now. :)
www24@lemm.ee 2 months ago
If you do, please tell me because I’d be really interested to hear! One of these days I’ll buy a first-gen celeron 633mhz machine and do some of these tests myself :P