Old Computer Challenge 2024 - report

2024-07-20

Due to family committments, work and also a few days not feeling great I had less time than I liked to use my old computer. Still the challenge was pretty successful and I'm definitely going to keep this old computer out of retirement and using it more as my "home computer" now that I have it fully set up in a way I like.

What I did with that machine

I've been able to do pretty much everything I wanted with this machine. This was due to a combination of me trying to do not too demanding work and the specs of my 2009 MacBook Pro still being powerful enough to be up to the task.

I managed to get a lot done with my old computer. Here it is a not exhaustive list:

• I updated this website;
• I tweaked the Nix config of the machine itself and also of other machines in my homelab, the latter via SSH;
• I did all my usual browsing, including the personal websites of other people who took part to the challenge. I was ready to use a combination of Firefox and links2 but I ended up using almost exclusively Firefox;
• I chatted on IRC (easy with old hardware) and on Discord, from the browser. It worked but as expected Discord felt a bit heavy. Still very much usable;
• I edited and executed a Jupyter notebook to generate charts from data from my solar system. I usually just use Jupyter running in my homelab but for a challenge I ran it locally and it worked perfectly fine;
• I watched some YouTube videos. It all worked (auto-selecting the 360p version) but this made the fan become very loud though. I tried to enable hardware decoding and I've got it working with mpv but not really with Firefox. Nvidia GPUs and Linux aren't a great match :(.

Overall I'm happy with the variety of tasks I've been able to complete. I haven't done anything particularly complex, but that's pretty much everything I use a computer for. The main exception is writing some software for myself but I usually write in Rust and for that I am going to SSH into my homelab machine and develop remotely.

Next year

This year everything went so smoothly that I've been tempted to get the 1st generation Raspberry Pi to add some challenge but time constraints and the logistics of finding an place with a monitor and an ethernet cable stopped me. Maybe next year. That would mean using Linux again (Raspberry Pi OS, Void or Alpine are the distros I've been looking at), trying something new with NetBSD or even going more exotic with something like Plan9 or RISC OS.

Talking about alternative operating systems, I've been curious about Haiku for a long time. Spinning up a VM in my homelab with it is trivial and I actually did it already. Still, I would prefer brining it up using actual hardware. After all this is the old computer challenge and using a different operating system from a new computer wouldn't feel right.

Conclusion

I am fairly happy with the "old hardware, new software" combination and this experiment showed that old hardware can still be more than adequate. The reason I like to combine it with new software is ease of finding software, compatibility with the modern web and security.

I could have used an era appropriate version of macOS for the challenge but that would have been a different experience and I very likely would have been able to do fewer things.

The challenge was lots of fun. It gave me a reason to tinker with computers but also to try to use them. Being able to follow what other people have been doing has been the cherry on top. It's very interesting to see how different people had different takes, used different machines and operating systems and (hopefully!) all had fun.

During the challenge I also used my modern work laptop, I cannot really avoid it till I have a job, and my modern smartphone, which I kind of wish I used less. Maybe that's another thing to think about for next year.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out for any comment or question.