3mo ago

Minimum specs

Before installing Linux, I had originally planned to dual-boot on my main PC, but somehow a gaming rig from 5 years ago isn't good enough to run windows 11, which is ridiculous.

130 comments

Tux: What 4 GB RAM? This is some gourmet shit.
- Tell that to the modern web though.
  
  The web is so fat nowadays that it makes Windows look slim.
  
  Fuckin' a man. My backup server uses 70mb of ram, My NAS, 250mb. My laptop, about 1GB doing normal usage things. Open up one webpage with a YouTube video embedded and the processor constantly runs all 4 cores at 30%+, fan is on high, 3GB ram getting eaten away at for a paused video and text. It's ridiculous.
  
  And electron based apps 🤮 Why did they become the norm, especially ones that don't even have an actual website version.
  
  I compile links2 from source and use "links2 -g" strictly nowadays. Wikipedia works so it has everything I need. I would contribute if I knew how to program latex rendering.
  
  and all the oem bundleware. i knocked-down fresh boot idle active ram usage from 5.5gb to 3.5gb on a new dell desktop just by uninstalling anything that had 'dell' in the name.

If they stopped showing so many ads, maybe they’d leave enough memory to run an operating system.
- That'd be like asking a a kid to stop selling lemonade so he can focus on making a sign out of something other than cardboard
  
  Nah man, Microsoft doesn’t give their OS away for free. The ads are just greed on top of an already expensive product.
  
  More like asking a kid to stop selling lemonade so he can focus on making lemonade out of something other than cardboard.

Just save yourself the hassle and ditch the malware.
- I did and am much happier. When I went to install Linux, it was a last minute decision to try to dual boot, and that was the day that the Win11 pop-up showed up saying that I couldn't, so I thought "that makes my decision easy" and wiped the whole thing.

A Celeron n4000 with only two cores, 4gb of DDR 3 RAM and 80gb sata I 5400rpm drive, that takes 25 minutes to boot: ✅ supported by Windows 11 because introduced on the market after 2018
A Xeon E7-8894 v4 with 24 cores, 3tb of ECC RAM and petabytes of nvme storage, paid $130k: ❌ unsupported by Windows 11 because introduced on the market before 2018
A totally valid way to define minimum requirements...
- It'll run the Windows 11 IoT edition and it'll run it well.
  (though it'd run Linux better :) )

God, I love Linux nerds.
That is a glorious pizza box computer.
- :) I have an old 2010 network drive, running Debian and OpenMediaVault for music and video shares. It has 256MB of memory and doesn't need it all to act as a folder share and streaming box. Windows 11 needing such a high end chip to run is just really poor optimization
  
  The thing with Windows 11 Hardware requirements isnt that its poorly optimised (tbf, it is poorly optimised, but computers that have the power to run it can't) but because windows 11 requires your CPU to have TPM(? Im Not sure), which only newer CPUs have. So even if your PC could run it, it can't due to the TPM Requirement.

I made the switch to Linux about ten years ago ... mainly because I didn't want to upgrade to the latest Windows 7/8 and I just didn't have the need to use any Windows software ... all I do is write documents, store photos, some light video editing and go online - why do I need any other OS? The only problem I had at the start was video editing ... it just meant I didn't do any. Now there are several options to get that done too.
The fun part was that my old hardware suddenly ran twice as fast with the latest Ubuntu at the time ... and I haven't look back since.
- Linux gang rise up!!!
  I switch to Linux in college (20ish years ago) and have been exclusively using it since. Windows XP was my last windows machine. I've never regretted it.
  
  If it wasn't for work/school and Microsoft fucking around with document standards I'd happily never see a windows machine again. My last true windows machine was 7 for gaming and correcting document formatting in college.
  I went 15 years without needing a windows machine and now I'm taking online courses where a full windows install is required for some test taking, so I have tiny10 on a dirty gross separate drive, dual booted, fuck off with windows 11. I have a VM with it as well for fixing formatting in docs and spreadsheets I make in libreoffice, because Microsoft STILL has to just fuck with open standards.
  I'll be damned if I have to use it more than I have to.
- My first "true gaming PC" has been turned into a NAS and small docker host. Its about to turn 15, and I have spare hardware to upgrade it, but I like to see how much I can churn out of it.
  
  I did the same for a while using TrueNAS ... I cobbled together every single spare HDD I had at the time onto my first true desktop PC (450Mhz CPU with a gig of RAM, in a giant box full of HDD that felt like a small heater in my office).. I think it was six or seven drives that added up to about 2TB and I felt like I had become Hackerman .... I even set it up with Transmission to download a bunch of Linux distros I wanted to try as well as a ton on movies and TV shows I couldn't get at the time. Basically the reason why I got back into watching all the Star Trek series after downloading all of TNG, VOY and DS9

Extra fun: My current gaming laptop has a TPM, but it's so new that Windows 10 doesn't recognize it. So when I try to upgrade it says 'lol nope'.
- The TPM requirement is artificial and can be bypassed in the installer.
  
  But I don't want to install windows
  
  Tell me more, I thought TPM was hardware checked?
- My work laptop had required CPU, but said can't upgrade due to TPM chip being 1.2 and requirements are TPM 2.0. So I downloaded the firmware updater to get the TPM to 2.0. Then I reran the checker and it said nope CPU not supported. Lol, just arbitrary nonsense.

that a ryzen 2200g with 16gb ram, nvme, and usb-c is 'unsupported' is total bullshit. i just pulled one from service. meanwhile, i just 'upgraded' a 10th gen celeron desktop, and some even-worse gemini lake laptops, all with hdd (except one with a massive 64gb emmc chip) to 11.
(that ryzen is now rocking silverblue and looking for a new forever home)

I recently picked up a couple of e-waste laptops, Thinkpad x130e's with an AMD E-300, 4GB RAM and a 320GB spinner. For the pair I paid $60 shipped. These were low-end semi-ruggedized laptops meant for students released around the time that HBO started showing Game of Thrones.
I've put Debian on one and it runs great. All the hardware just works, everything is pretty quick after boot, and I love how rugged and portable it is. Email, writing, basic productivity, hobby development and 2D gaming all work great. Web browsing takes a hit if I open too many tabs, the video card is too underpowered for most 3D games that came out after 2010, and large compiles are slow. I'm a bit worried about the aging HDD so I'm going to replace it with a cheap SSD which should help with boot and compile times.
The other one I'm not sure about. I've tried HaikuOS and the video and wifi work well and the whole system feels very snappy, but there's no audio or webcam support. Redox seems interesting but needs a whole lot more hardware support. I'll probably just end up cloning the first one unless I can get a better suggestion.
All that is to say, Linux is great on old cheap hardware.
- My laptop is also an old e-waste Thinkpad. I run Xubuntu on it and it flies.
  
  E-waste Thinkpads are quickly becoming my favorite laptops.
- Even the cheapest SSD you can find will improve the performance quite significantly.
- i use some of those low power soc laptops, running with lid closed (heat is basically a non-issue), for pihole, white noise, and a few other 'little' things. one of 'em is even running stuff in VMs (the rest are debian-based dietpi).

Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025.
Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer.
But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?
https://endof10.org/
- The good news for Microsoft is the EOL did make me buy a new computer
  The bad news is that I have no intention of ever using Windows again now. I was already on the fence whether I'd ever willingly upgrade to Win11, but making it a high barrier to entry cemented my decision

I am physicist and software engineer. My current Linux desktop PC is now 16 years old, from 2009, and with 8-core CPU and 16 GB RAM is still plain over-powered for running Emacs and rustc under Debian and Arch in VM. It is only the third desktop computer I own. I bought the second one in 1999, and that one had an AMD K6 (Pentium-like) CPU with 300Mhz clock, running S.u.S.E. Linux, and I used it for writing uni stuff and my PhD thesis on digital speech processing. The first PC I owned was a old PC with an Intel 80386 CPU which my uncle gave me in 1995. I could barely run Word 6.0 on Windows 3.11 on it (MS Word became very instable for larger documents), but LaTeX (emTeX) was running totally fine (after installing it from about 30 floppy disks).
So, to sum up: Using Linux you will save a ton of money for hardware.

Win11 is 4,5 years old and still feels like 10 builds away from going gold. It feels thrown together.
- I just want to know why I can only click on the date on the main monitor to view the calendar. Why? It's such a workflow killer when I'm scheduling something and trying to check what day of the week it's happening on. Takes multiple clicks on the non-main monitor before I realize what's happening every time
  
  That pisses me off as well. It works fine on Windows 10 so somebody fucked that up along the line somewhere. There's no excuse for it.
  
  Satya enters chat: "Thrust da phrosess!"
- Regularly, file explorer just stops being an explorer for me. Window sizing and buttons work, but I can't select files or folders. I have to exit file explorer and relaunch it.
  
  also - for whatever reason File Explorer occasionally decides to think about life and stuff for a minute or two upon opening random folders - it just keeps loading even if there's like two files inside 2mb total.
- I spent probably 5-10 minutes trying to figure out how to get into the old "add a printer" thing from control panel so I could manually install a USB printer for someone yesterday. The new version in settings was presenting a list of every device on the network (corporate environment so 100s of devices) and doesn't even have a search field. Completely fucking useless.
  
  and if you want to add some old scanner - you might also embrace Satanism because fuck this shit.

Hey, that looks like the same PC I recently got ... I immediately installed Linux on it, though.
- You might want to invest in some spacers to prevent your monitor from breaking when you close the box.
  
  Heh. I actually meant the colorful one.

Little PCeaser's.

That box is suspiciously similar to the laptop I leave at my parents for when I visit. The mouse and keyboard even look identical!
- Would you describe your laptop as "hot-n-ready"?
  
  Delivers in 30 minutes or less, free either way?

I had the same on my 5 year old gaming rig. Turns out only thing blocking it was TPM being disabled. I reluctantly upgraded, as I have too many files on my PC needed for my wife's visa process, as well as a 2 year old toddler, so I really don't currently have the time to sort through, and backup all the files, and then install Linux.
- Ok so important advice: regardless of Win/Linux, back up your data! Hard drive failures happen, and it can happen randomly at any time. So if you have important documents or any data you want to keep, back it up onto another drive, and ideally a second back up off site. And then get in the habit of refreshing those backups regularly,
  I have had multiple hard drives failures over the years and learnt the hard way that you need multiple backups.
  This is also important as a 5 year old gaming PC means 5 year old hard drives, and shit really does happen.
  EDIT: And if you really have 0 time, get a second drive the same size as your hard drive and clone it. It's better than nothing and can be set up in minutes. It's not efficient as you will clone data you don't need but at least you'll be safe as soon as it's done.
  
  You speak a lot of truth, and something I subconsciously know I should have been doing.
  How do you recommend I do it? Buy an external HDD/SSD and manually copy everything across once a week or so?
- Totally understandable. I took literal years to finally get a backup set up so that I could do this.
- Well hey, if you keep your old hardware there's probably a ton of different ways you can use it for other purposes! :)

These memes about required specs make Linux look like its primary userbase are bums.
- I have Linux running on a machine with 256 MB of RAM and a single core 700 MHz ARM11 CPU.
  I also have it running on a machine with 128 multi-gigahertz cores and a terabyte of RAM. That flexibility is part of why I use Linux.
- Linux: the official OS of vagabonds
  
  I'm literally camping out in the woods right now and installed linux on a mini PC last night. No real home, no job, but I've got penguins!
  
  Vagabums (idk which, but def a name for a foss project)
- I miss the old images of the batshit crazy homemade Beowulf clusters people used to throw together that looked like something straight out of Serial Experiments Lain.
- I think it means we like to be able to make full use...
  Whether its a couple of servers with 4416+'s with 128GB ram and a pair of rtx 6000s or an 11yr old thinkpad w/8GB ram, its not the OS getting in my way.
  
  Look at this rich guy who's thinkpad is only 11 years old and has 8GB of RAM. Must be real nice to have been born with a silver spoon.
  😉

Someone got the link to the guy's video installing windows 11 on a 2007 Sun Workstation by disabling the arbitrary checks?

I had one of the Macintosh iBook G4s with the notoriously shitty graphics card soldering. Early days of lead-free soldering. Mine started to fail just outside of warranty. The 'fix' was to put a lot of pressure on the chip so that all the connections were held in place, but that was quite difficult to do while it was still a laptop.
Dismantled the damn thing, yeeted the plastic shell, and screwed the remains onto a sheet of plywood. Looked a lot like pizza-box PC in the corner there. Got another couple of years out of it. Made it a lot more convenient for watching videos, since you could just prop the whole thing against a wall or whatever. Couple of USB extension leads meant that you could still use a mouse and keyboard in comfort.

That fan in there is probably bloat.

*optional (everything in the lower right panel)

Now genuinely curious, as an ex-Windows-refugee, how did the non-Windows-refugees, the "native" GNU/Linux users, find out about it?
Edit: BTW, started a journey with a laptop in a place with no internet. Luckily I had the foresight to install GNU/Linux on it before I started my journey. I was constantly reminded that I were in the same situation with Windows, the computer would stop working because it had no internet. You need internet for Microshit office, Adobe software, etc. That was the time I said: there has to be a better way. That's when I started using free software. I'll take the occasional, inadvertent usability annoyance with free software over the megacorporations trying to constantly gang rape me into submission any day.
- I did come from Windows but the story wouldn’t change from anywhere else. The install CD was on a store shelf and I bought it.

🤌

I have a win10 PC with an extra hard drive on which I've installed Arch on. I'm thinking of deleting the Windows partition for extra storage on my Arch side because my CPU doesn't support Win11, apparently. Is there anything I should be careful of before I go forward with my plan other than backing up data and the usual hardware compatibility issues when only using Linux?
- Since you are already using arch I guess you kinda know what youre doing so you should be fine.
  
  Haha, damn. Sorry.
  I dunno why, but when I decided to try Linux six months ago, I just went with Arch and every other day I regret my choice. I'm too invested now and I do like tinkering.

I recently built a PC and installed Windows 10 on it because I primarily built it to play League of Legends (don't judge me). Aside from that, I've also found a couple ways to get my hands on other games as well. My other daily driver already Kubuntu installed onto it and I'd really like to use some distro on this desktop PC, but it's just not really practicable since all the games would be running from exe files or have anti-cheat (screw you League). I don't really see a way around this apart from using virtual Windows for the games within Linux, right?
- Not all anticheat-games won't run on Linux. For example, I got Wuthering Waves running on Bazzite, although it uses kernel level anticheat. If a game does not have any anticheat software, it will probably run fine via Proton.
  League of Legends used to run on Linux in the past, but I haven't checked how the situation nowadays is.
  
  Yea it used to but it's been killed by Riot's new Vanguard anti-cheat system. It's also kernel level afaik, so it's officially impossible to play League on Linux now

Weird, my gaming rig that I built before COVID runs 11 like a champ. Didn't buy good parts by the sound of it.
- I bought a shitty laptop 3 and 1/2 years ago that came with Windows 11 on it and I've never had an issue with it I don't know how all these people are having problems with these supposedly well-built systems
  
  The problem is that Microsoft set seemingly arbitrary hardware requirenents to install Windows 11, it's not about performance.
  If you have a Kaby Lake or Ryzen 2000 system of any specs, you are already out of luck, no matter if you have 32 cores or 128G RAM.
  But somehow, magically, a few Kaby Lake Microsoft Surface laptops are fine to run Windows 11, so those specific CPUs are cool. The rest (mostly desktops) is not.

Reminds me of the Novena.

Installed Fedora on my newish dell with intel integrated graphics. Watching videos in Firefox was nothing but lag, even in 720P.
And also when the lid is closed, it doesn't go to sleep.
Linux is only good if you have some kind of driver support.
- https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryHowto%5Cb%29
  You should install the intel media driver and ffmpeg to have hardware acceleration support on firefox, iirc
  
  Thanks. Why wasn't this installed already?

130 comments

🤌