Rebooted

Single core? That must be more like 20 years old now.
- I don't believe this meme for a second.
  Wikipedia:
  The production of single-core desktop processors ended in 2013 with the Celeron G440, G460, G465 & G470.
  Those are so weak it's not even funny.
  
  Imagine that computing environments existed and thrived before gigabytes and gigahertz.
  I have done significant work on a machine with a single 8MHz core and 8Mbytes of RAM that I shared with several people.
  
  Intel still makes Celerons that are probably just slightly faster than these
- It's not common, but you can find some in really cheap chromebooks going back only a few years and those are prime candidates for Linux.
  
  I've never seen one that wasn't 4 cores
  ARM is cheap
  
  Since they're Chromebooks aren't they already running Linux, with ChromeOS being a very light Gentoo, sort of

I remember when a ten year old laptop was just trash, unable to even boot a modern OS. Current hardware capacity exceeds our actual demand by so much that a ten year old computer is still adequate for most users (assuming you aren't on Windows).
My 8 year old 1080ti graphics card can run most games perfectly fine on a 1080p/60 screen (still the most common spec budget monitor). I would not be surprised if it that PC hits 10+ years of gaming without a real need for upgrade.
- assuming you aren't on Windows
  This is the tough part.
  I had a 2011 MacBook Pro sitting around some years ago I had upgraded from and I offered it to my brother for his kids to use because of the built in child controls they could setup. He just told me a few weeks ago they were done with it and asked me if I could wipe it or tell him how to do it could be recycled.
  I took it back, put Mint XFCE on it but I can’t give it away to anyone I know because it has Linux on it. I’ll probably get a display cable for it and run it as my torrent box.
  
  You can self host a lot on something like that.
- I just upgraded my seven-year-old Ryzen 1700x/Vega 56 system to Ryzen 5700x3D/RX 9070 XT. It wasn't because my old system was actually inadequate already, though. It was mainly because I have no idea how long the market is going to be fucked up from the tariffs and wanted to get the upgrade done before the shit hit the fan, just in case.
  
  I thought about getting an M4 MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles for that same reason but I just don't need it.
- 100% agree. The computer I have now, I only bought because I needed more cores and ram for my docker dev environment. But I had a Yoga 2 Pro. It worked great and was fast for most of what I needed. I gave the machine to my cousin so he could learn to program on it. Still a fast machine. Doesn't play video games, but it didn't play video games when I bought it either.
- I remember when people had to have the newest PC just in order to not fall asleep when running the ERP client and Word at the same time, and the top salespeople got those machines anew every 12 to 18 months.
  Now it is hard to find a current machine that is not fit for such undemanding work for years.
- My ten year old laptop is an i7 with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and a dedicated graphics chip.
  My current laptop has 24 GB RAM and also a 1 TB SSD.
  Feels like not much progress.
  
  The one place I see a huge leap is in MacBooks. The capabilities of a 2015 Intel based MBP are laughable when compared to an M4 based 2025 MBP. I use an MBP for my music production and I just cannot make it choke, no matter what I throw at it.

My eeepc sadly died last year, it was a single core laptop i had running hannah montana linux in my bathroom as a music player.
My Precision M6400, a dual core made in 2008, is still going strong and sure, it's slow, but it still works and has replaced the eeepc in the bathroom so now I can listen to music OR watch videos (not streaming) during my extra long showers. i don't keep it in the bathroom, it's on a dock in another room connected to a monitor with a really long dvi-i cable.
- Pic of the setup? This sounds wild. Is the cable going under the door or what? Is the monitor wall mounted?
  
  I fed the cable through a hole in the wall, not that it matters since the door doesn't shut all the way. The building is old and the frame doesn't match the door shape anymore.
  It was easy to feed the line because, well, the monitor is in the hole too. It's a big hole. Honestly, it's kind of embarrassing. A mouse infestation took out the supports and drywall around an exhaust vent/air conditioner wall-unit thing and it fell out of the wall. Plus the landlord is a slum lord.
  I can't really do a current picture for complicated phone reasons/problems. Just imagine a monitor in this hole, instead of the portal to Narnia which I lovingly crafted in GIMP: https://i.imgur.com/BLHhUF0.gif
  The monitor is in that, mostly held in with spray foam and duct tape. My rent is $325 a month, no contract, no late fees up to 3 months. My landlord is a slumlord. IDK, I feel that might help explain things around here.

Isn't that guy actually dead, tho?
- The actor? yes.
  
  Yeah too bad, he seemed nice
- Black Panther never dies.

Literally did this last year with my laptop that would shut down constantly, often unable to even boot into Windows. Figured it was just stuffed cos it's a hundred years old.
Chucked Mint on, runs like a boss. Happy to say since then I have owned no Windows devices.

Debian 12 let me turn an ailing Gateway Centrino laptop into a media center + game station. It's technically dual core but it's 32-bit and really, really goddamn slow. Still, it's more than fast enough to run everything from the 4th console generation and before, and play a bunch of stuff I snagged with yt-dlp... as long as I made sure it was h264 and 480p or lower. Yeesh.
Still more than enough to make the break room at work amazing.

I wonder what happened to the 15(?) year old laptop at my mum and dads house…could anything be achieved with that?
- Put in a SSD and you'll be surprised how far it can get you.
  My father is still using a 13 year old 14" Dell I gave up 6 years ago. He's even using it with windows 10, and having a SSD it works almost bearably well. They keyboard broke, and with the laptop not being Win11 compatible, he asked for an upgrade.
  I got him a 6 year old Thinkpad, but I'll install Mint and give him a VM for the few SWs he needs Windows for.
  
  And also put in as much RAM as possible.
- Not a bad chance. Worth looking into imo
- Surely you could do something with it, but it probably has less power than a current raspberry pi.
- You can use it to self host maybe

RIP :(

I have an old DV7 dating back to the Bush administration that I should load Linux on.
It did really well from Vista through 7. I haven't used it in years, but it would probably do fine with Linux.

i have a quad from like 14-ish years ago working pretty well with ubuntu. not the fastest computer on the planet but really usable.

and what can you do with that single core? probably 1.2 GHz tops, no AVX and AES and others..

What DE?