Comment by 🚀 stack
Re: "I have a late-2010s ThinkPad running OpenBSD, but it's…"
Weird. My goto machine is a T470 with an I5, and it's fast as heck running Ubuntu. I use it for dev work and never felt it was too slow.
I bought it for $75 and put in an SSD.
I had spilled a liter of water onto the keyboard during a late night session. It kept working -- it has drain holes and is pretty much waterproof.
Best machine ever.
2025-09-05 · 8 months ago
37 Later Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · 2025-09-05 at 13:04:
I am always advocating people give Haiku a spin. Does pretty well on older hardware if you stay off the web.
🚀 ingrix · 2025-09-05 at 13:14:
OpenBSD can be definitely a little bit poky because they focus on security and more sanity checks happen in the code. I recommend you give FreeBSD another spin. It has a ton of features that I love a lot, both for server and desktop usage (e.g. jails, good package manager) and I use it all over the place. NetBSD is a good choice too but also less feature-rich than FreeBSD in my experience.
🐐 drh3xx · 2025-09-05 at 13:14:
@jlxip isn't SerenityOS only intended for usage in a VM currently? Drivers might be a struggle on physical HW.
@dce Haiku is not a bad OS but there's no disk encryption, multi user (so, no login prompt preventing access) or a firewall. AFAIK the devs are against changing any of those points of concern so I'm not sure I can recommend it for doing your Internet banking on etc... if you don't want to do anything sensitive though then sure, give it a go; it's actually pretty good.
🐐 drh3xx · 2025-09-05 at 13:21:
@dce how much tinkering have you done with sysctls? If you are happy to accept that you're opening yourself up to some threats then enabling hyperthreading will surely give you a boost. You could consider running certain things from a RAMdisk. I believe there is some leg work required to get 3D acceleration in Firefox and increasing max file handles can benefit that too. On the FFS side softdep is now deprecated so that previous boost will have no benefit in recent versions of OBSD.
🚀 stack · 2025-09-05 at 13:26:
I don't know about you, but to do any banking or even to book a flight on delta I have to turn off all privacy and security settings in my browser. I keep Opera and Chrome with no security add-ons to do the only things that require security and privacy.
My bank has something like 30 web bugs and trackers on the login page alone.
Sometimes I think my life is a bad joke.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-05 at 13:27:
@ingrix I was actually planning to go back to FreeBSD or HardenedBSD a few weeks ago; but for some reason I couldn't get a single bootable install. NetBSD did work, but I couldn't figure out how to enable disk encryption.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-05 at 13:29:
@drh3xx I have already played with the sysctls as much as I am comfortable. The system is usable; but when Windows 10 vastly outperforms my OS of choice, it's probably a good idea to reconsider using it.
🐐 drh3xx · 2025-09-05 at 14:59:
@dce depending on software requirements you could always try DragonflyBSD. The benchmarks I've seen are typically quite old but its performance is almost comparable to some leading Linux Distros and Hammer2 FS is modern with things like snapshots.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-05 at 15:51:
@drh3xx Sounds like an idea. I'll give it a shot!
💎 pista · 2025-09-05 at 18:52:
There’s only one answer: TempleOS ✝️
🦔 bsj38381 · 2025-09-05 at 19:10:
I've been brainstorming on what OS K want to use on my old X61 ThinkPad Tablet, sicne it originally uses Windows 7 Ultimate and has a touch screen.
for sure postmarketos... on touch devices its amazing... have it on my phone and on a mini laptop... try it!
🚀 stack · 2025-09-05 at 19:37:
TempleOS, but only if you are white.
👻 darkghost · 2025-09-05 at 20:36:
Red Star OS. It is completely safe and definitely not backdoored by the DPRK secret police. (This is sarcasm, do not run this OS.)
💎 pista · 2025-09-05 at 21:26:
@stack I think it’s only specifically off limits to glowies. You just run them over with your car: that’s what you do.
— https://youtu.be/PF8iPf2p_ow
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-05 at 21:43:
@pista I think you may be in the wrong thread.
🚀 stack · 2025-09-05 at 21:47:
Is @pista in the wrong thread? Or in such a correct thread that your mind is doing wheelies?
💎 pista · 2025-09-05 at 22:19:
If this thread is about the absolute best operating systems for older computers I’m definitely in the right thread.
🚀 stack · 2025-09-05 at 22:38:
I have trouble accepting that a ThinkPad between 5 and 15 years old is 'an older computer'. Like I said, I write serious code on mine, and the only time it seems a bit slow is when I build FPGA CPUs and systems in Verilog (which is slow on pretty much anything)
💎 pista · 2025-09-05 at 23:13:
I’m using a Pentium III tower and my PowerBook G4 most days. People talk about that like it’s “retro computing”.
Still running Windows 98 and OSX 10.4.11
Not retro computing. I just didn’t upgrade.
🐙 norayr · 2025-09-06 at 00:15:
what do ou run on that laptop? what is slow? gnome? kde? web browsers?
i am sure some window manager like windowmaker, dwm, i3, bspwm, fvwm should work very fast. try to open a terminal. or even gimp.
the web is the problem. the spec is the real problem, the browsers just try to implement it.
modern gtk/qt toolkits are also heavy.
but try amfora, xterm, st, pidgin. even lagrange and netsurf work well. you can use some web to gemini gateway instead a web browser.
and your computer should be very fast.
look i even run windowmaker on pinephone, or on motorola droid4 with lapdock, and those are very fast. your laptop is more powerful.
still you can try native oberon or a2 (aos)
🐙 norayr · 2025-09-06 at 00:36:
wrote this on a motorola droid 4 running maemo-leste (devuan daedalus with hildon desktop) in latest larange. everything works very fast.
👻 darkghost · 2025-09-06 at 01:55:
Web is such a pig and the bare minimum sane usability for it is 4 GB of RAM in a full featured browser, in my opinion.
🚀 stack · 2025-09-06 at 02:34:
Xubuntu, xfce, Librefox. dwm for a while but was too much trouble. xilinx verilog tools and libre fpga tools slow but that's because of python which I avoid like the plague.
🐐 uyasga · 2025-09-06 at 02:52:
I run GhostBSD on a Compaq Presario CQ57-229wm - 15.6-inch AMD C-50 Processor 1Ghz 4GB 250GB DVDRW.
You need 8GB to install latest version. Only 4GB to install older and update.
Very usable.
🚀 stack · 2025-09-06 at 02:57:
You really need 16GB for web. my other 8GB machine slows to a crawl and locks up twice a day if I use the browser
💎 pista · 2025-09-06 at 03:00:
All of it goes to JavaScript and video.
It doesn’t take nearly that much horsepower to render some html elements with css styling.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-06 at 09:13:
@norayr I run bspwm with Links2 as my browser and Kermit as my terminal. I have 8GB of RAM and an SSD. I have Tiny10 installed on the 80GB HDD that came with the laptop, and compared to OpenBSD it flies.
As for what I want to do... well, anything I can. At a minimum, I want to be able to write part of my dissertation using it. In an ideal world, I'd also be able to play a smooth game of Minecraft (obviously using an older release, like 1.8.9, and with things like Optifine).
Really the issue isn't what I want to do, it's the performance of everything. Lagrange has never frozen on a single installation of mine until now, the terminal should open instantly, and I should not have to reboot in order to use the I/O ports after closing the lid for a second.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-06 at 09:20:
@pista I normally disable JS anyway, even on my main laptop (T480s, 24GB RAM, Intel i7).
💎 pista · 2025-09-06 at 09:29:
Getting harder and harder to find pages that don't completely break as soon as you turn on NoScript.
When Web devs decided to make AJAX everywhere and "lazy loading" the standard of the Web they destroyed the Web.
🐙 norayr · 2025-09-07 at 00:31:
so you are saying openbsd on ssd feels slower that tiny (tiny core linux?) on hdd?
and what prevents you to write papers on that machine? didn't people write papers on 16bit pdp machines?
🐙 norayr · 2025-09-07 at 00:35:
maybe you need to browse web and download other papers in order to write yur paper?
i never played that game but i think there was a free libre implementation called minetest, now renamed to something else because people were thinking it is a test version.
🚀 stack · 2025-09-07 at 00:39:
I wrote papers with a quill pen!
Apple ][ with a dot matrix printer.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-07 at 01:25:
@norayr Tiny10 is a stripped-down image of Windows 10. It's surprisingly fast, especially considering it's running on an old HDD. However, since Microsoft are evil and Windows has more holes than Swiss cheese, installing it as the laptop's main OS it's not an option.
As for writing papers, that was more of an example; although I could rephrase it as "I want to be able to write my dissertation without losing my work or defenestrating my laptop".
🚀 Phosphors-ghost · 2025-09-12 at 13:49:
I’m running openbsd on my VPS right now, probably trying FreeBSD again on the micro desktop when 15 gets released shortly (I was burned by their build system being broken last time I tried in the spring.) On my Thinkpad, I’m running alpine Linux. Yes! The setup-alpine and setup-desktops can build a system incredibly fast, it can run in various “from ram” modes, and is very BSD-like (no systemd), but benefits from the Linux hardware support. It’s a little weird, but the fastest think I’ve tried.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-12 at 15:24:
@Phosphors-ghost If my new Slackware installation fails for whatever reason, which isn't unlikely, I'll give it a shot!
🚀 stack · 2025-09-12 at 16:22:
As I pointed out before, I am running Ubuntu on an i5 t470 with 16GB, and it works like a charm -- I use it as my dev machine.
additional 8GB = $10-20. Well worth it.
Original Post
I have a late-2010s ThinkPad running OpenBSD, but it's about as fast as a snail carrying heavy shopping through molasses. I'd like to run something other than Linux, for variety, but the other members of the BSD family failed for various reasons. What OS do you guys think I should try? Note: The machine in question has 8GB of RAM and an SSD. UPDATE: I am now running Slackware with Window Maker. However, further suggestions are still appreciated.