A story I wrote a while ago has just been posted on Linux.com, about running Linux on older hardware. The idea came from an eWeek article about Microsoft trying to debunk the idea that Linux runs well on older hardware. I spent quite a bit of time loading various distros on a PII 233MHz with 64MB of RAM. the results were a bit surprising, even though I’ve been using Linux for years.
Though Linux is perfectly usable on older hardware, I have to admit, I prefer to have a lot of horsepower available for my workstation. I have no patience for waiting for a computer to respond. I do a fair amount of compiling software, for example, and there’s no way I’d want to compile something like GNOME or KDE on a Pentium II with 64MB of RAM.
However, if all I was doing was a bit of Web browsing and writing in Vim, I think it’d be perfectly usable.
