22.04 Lubuntu on 10 year old hardware

Ah, yes, I remember the good old days of distro-butchering. I learned a lot of good tricks back then. One time, I didn’t have Internet access, but I also wanted the full LibreOffice suite on my KXStudio 14.04 systems. So I got the probably-not-so-good idea to hork the packages out of /var/cache/apt/archives from a laptop that I had downloaded LibreOffice on somewhere else, and I forcibly shoved them into my other systems with a swift dpkg -i and went on my merry way. The package manager threw a fit and I ended up with a lot of broken dependencies with this stunt, but LibreOffice seemed to work, and I used those “broken” systems as my main rigs for many months. :+1:

4 Likes

Yup I’ve done a few and seems as though it worked a bit better back in the old days although doesn’t seem to have this time.

Perhaps I had more patience back then to examine what I was removing didn’t affect shared dependencies and shared software.

The older I get the less patience I seem to have which kinda sometimes causes me problems.

1 Like

That’s why I like flatpacks and snaps. They don’t bug anyone with broken dependencies and run within a sandbox, which is why snaps take so long to launch on some occasions.

1 Like

I’m beginning to think the only problems with Snaps are the users as us users just don’t want to accept change.

Yep Snaps open slowly the first time but once opened Snaps work well on my old junk box computer builds.

I guess if we’re going to use Ubuntu and Ubuntu official flavors than we’re just going to have to get used to and accept Snaps.

3 Likes

I tend to agree here. I was no fan of snap packages when they were introduced, mostly as I still used i386 systems with 1GB of RAM, and whilst they could still run, it made me want to replace my boxes. That concern for me ended when i386 was dropped (disco or 19.04; as Lubuntu would be replaced by Debian for me). When I use i386 boxes (with RAM being 1 or 1.5GB only) I do tend to avoid snap, flatpak etc; but those boxes are from ~2005 which is more than a decade old.

The box I’m replying here is a 2009 dell desktop, so its older than 10 years; and I don’t really worry about snap packages on this box; I treat them as I do other libraries/toolkits and consider just how much RAM they’ll use, so I can ensure I’m not asking more from this box than it can provide with its limited resources (inc. spinning rust drive); meaning it’s the same calculation as I consider when the resource hit of loading a GTK based app that is deb format, on my usual LXQt/Qt5 desktop.

I use Debian boxes too, and find I’m adding snap to them as it’s usually just easier (my primary Debian desktop is a year older than this box; ie. a 2008 dell desktop but it’s ~equally spec’d). The primary reason I’d consider disabling swap was really just because of low-RAM.

It’s really just another package choice; and the more choices we have are always useful.

Do I have snapd running on my OpenSuSE (tumbleweed) or Fedora (I forget; not rawhide) installs? I can’t remember & I’m not going to boot them & find out. I’d say it’s 50% chance yes/no (but I’m really not a OpenSuSE/Fedora user; my home being in the Ubuntu/Debian world).

5 Likes

I use old desktop boxes and until only recently most of them if not all of them only had 4.0GB of memory and all are mechanical hard drives.

Recently I have been able to up the DDR2 memory to 6.0GB and 8GB which makes a big difference.

Perhaps one day I’ll get up to today’s hardware standard but at the moment what I already have works for what I use a computer for.

4 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.