I’m sitting here in 2026 runnin Fedora 43 on a laptop from 2016, and honestly? It’s smoother than it has any right to be. My entire workflow lives in Brave and Obsidian, and this “old” i5 handles it like a champ. There is something deeply satisfying about taking a “boring” enterprise machine, slapping GNOME on it, and watching it run circles around modern hardware,It’s actually fuckin depressing that a 10-year-old laptop has better utility than 99% of the “pro” hardware being sold today.have a native Ethernet port and a full SD slot. Imagine that shit No $60 Amazon adapters dangling off the side like life support just to get a stable connection 🙄that’s what I call good hardware built to last.#r/Linuxmasterrace
My employer offered to upgrade my many-years-old Thinkpad to a newer one, but it just did not stick (WiFi drivers in Linux were unstable). I returned it and kept using the old one. Why change what works.
Fedora + GNOME my beloved <3
Hello from Fedora Silverblue 43 on a 2009 HP Z600 workstation. Can’t believe how smoothly GNOME runs on this thing.
Hello Form NetBSD on a 2009 Thinkpad t410, ctwm is shit TwT
My daily driver is a 2014 i5 machine with 4GB RAM, running Fedora 43 Sway (riced but no animations).
It can simultaneously run Emacs, Librewolf 6-8 tabs (research), Helium 2-3 tabs (for email, calendar & cloud drive) and 1-2 desktop chat apps. If I flick on Freetube at this point, it’ll freeze up.
I’ve got a pretty minimalist approach to work so I don’t have too many things running most of the time. I use mostly system packages and Flatpaks sparingly. I can keep running this thing as my daily driver for a few more years.
Also stick a 27" display and a pair of 5" powered studio speakers into it in the evenings to enjoy some movie streaming.
ps: I’ve recently configured another 12GB of virtual memory (?) on the SSD to support the 4GB RAM on the machine and that has significantly helped with multitasking.
ps2: Sharing the above to encourage to try Linux out. I came to this with zero knowledge amd experience. Really amazing what’s possible.
ps3: May be also good to mention that if first ran Linux Mint (with no optimisations or modifications) on this machine and only moved to Fedora a year later. Both distros worked flawlessly. If anybody is keen to know why I moved from Linux Mint to Fedora, please ask and I will share my experience.
Why did you move away from Mint?
In the beginning it was that I wanted to try Gnome and Fedora. I was new to Linux then and experimenting was exciting.
But I guess the important point here (for me at least) is why I stayed on. Fedora
I realised the system packages for LibreOffice and some other apps were newer on Fedora.
Being able to run this laptop mostly on fairly current system packages meant more compatibility (eg. formatting cnsistency on LibreOffice) and not incurring resource overheads from running the same software on Flatpaks. I’ve not scientifically tested this but it does “feel” a lot snappier running system packaged apps.
I made the decision to move to Sway when Fedora 43 came out and that freed even more resources from not having to run Gnome.
Gnome was a good introduction to a keyboard driven workflow and moving to Sway was a lot easier because if my experience navigating via the keyboard on Gnome.
None of this was premeditated. Its just how things turned out for me. And with Linux, I’d probably optimise more as I go along.
My system just grew to adapt to my needs, preferences and limitations every step of the way. And I think that journey will continue to adapt as I go.
Will I recommend LinixMint to anyone? 100%!!! I cannot find any fault with it. Its super reliable, beautiful UI, decent customisations, etc. I’ve set up LMDE (the Debian variant of LinuxMint) for a few Windows-refugee friends of mine and they’ve been having a great time.
Will I go back to Mint? If I could run Sway on it, then perhaps. But I dont have a need to at this moment.
That sound good. If you do want to go back, you can easily install Swap if you want to, and Ubuntu Server if you install Flatpak and remove Snap and some other Ubuntu bloat is basically Mint without a preinstalled desktop environment, so you can install Sway wuth no Cinnamon stuff.
Ha. Learnt something today. Thank you for the share. You are kind.
note: the term “virtual memory” I used in my response above refers to swap memory. I was having trouble recalling.
Well my 25$ Value Village SFF PC works well after about 100$ of upgrades, including a i7 and 32GB of RAM (bought last year)…
I installed Linux on a ThinkPad T480 and it’s now my gaming PC.
(Granted, I’m a patient gamer.)my common suggestion for people looking to switch is throw linux on your last laptop if its in working condition and see how well it runs vs your newer one with windows.
My favorite solution is to take my laptop from work being decommissioned, drop Linux on it, and have it last for years to come.
My wife is using my laptop from ~9 years ago. I’m using my work laptop from ~5 years ago, and my current work laptop is about to get decommissioned. My oldest will probably get the one my wife is using.
They all work great.
I just stuck a new battery in my laptop for its 9th birthday. Still going strong with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Hello from late 2013 MacBook Pro with NixOS
"I’ve been eyeing NixOS, but I’ll admit I’m struggling. The way the package manager works is a bit of a headache. How has your experience been with it so far?"
I would skip it if that is an issue. I think Bazzite with a few Gnome extensions (Dash to Panel, Arc Menu, and GTK 4 Desktop Icons NG) is the best for beginners. It just works.
Moving to NixOS was quite a challenge for me. It felt like a Iot of different concepts that it took a while to understand.
I’m glad I pushed through because I take like it now. Now that I have my config everything is easy and straightforward.
People talk a lot about software enshittification, but hardware enshittification is also a thing!
My uncle has a country place
That no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm
Before the Motor Law.Dunno why you’re getting down-voted, this song fits perfectly.
I mean, it is some carbrain propaganda that aligned with the government-approved destruction of walkable cities and public transit. Soo it is kind to a hymn to enshittification in its own way.
We need to keep old hardware alive and avoid e-waste when possible. What is your computer?
My wife’s upgraded 2012 MacBook Pro is nicknamed the beast as it’s so snappy running Fedora Workstation.
Hell yeah! I’m typing this on a 2013 i7 Macbook air running LMDE 13 and it runs like a dream.
I’ve got one of those. So nice to this day. That touchpad 🥰
Wait you can run Linux on a macbook? 🤔
Yes on the intel MacBooks :) I put cachyOS on mine and even though it used to be an overheating laptop the fans don’t even start. Processor stays at around 40-50C.
For those wondering about newer Silicon Macs, there’s Asahi Linux.
Even the apple silicon ones can run linux. The only things that don’t work are thunderbolt (but you can still get USB4 from the same port) and fingerprint reader.
https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/I’d even go so far as to say Mac OS is more “polite” about dual booting than Windows is. It doesn’t overwrite your bootloader every update, and uses the more sane UTC for the realtime clock.
My 2013 Dell XPS laptop is still running beautifully with Fedora 43 too! Honestly, it’s amazing how much life a piece of old hardware can have with Linux running on it.
hel yea my thinkpad t480 is a little younger than that but it’s top tier, had to reimage a bunch of windows laptops today and got reminded just how slooooooooooooow corporate hardware can be i can’t believe people work with that and just accept it as the way that computers are
Running Debian on a 2014 ThinkPad T440p here — swapped in an i7-4710MQ and 16GB RAM for under $30 total on eBay. Compiles code, runs containers, handles everything I throw at it.
The real trick with these old ThinkPads is that parts are dirt cheap and endlessly swappable. Battery dying? $15 replacement. Screen too dim? Swap in an IPS panel for $25. Try doing that with anything made after 2020.
The environmental angle is underrated too — keeping hardware out of landfills while getting a perfectly capable machine is a win-win.
I got a stack of Lenovo tinys in my cupboard 🤣. I’ve put a few to good use.
