Comment by 🚀 stack
Re: "🖥️ Reusing Old Computers with Arch Linux and DWM"
I routinely use a 14-year old machine with Xubuntu out of the box. Plenty of processing power for everything I do: editing, compiling (C) instantly, Gemini and even some web.
Apr 04 · 5 weeks ago
15 Later Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · Apr 04 at 19:13:
A stock windows 11 can use around 10 GB of very expensive RAM while doing absolutely nothing. Stock Haiku OS uses about 110 MB. A relatively heavy DE on Linux is barely 2 GB. There is no reason for a mainstream OS like Windows to be such a pig.
🚀 SavaRocks [OP] · Apr 04 at 19:27:
@darkghost and if newer versions of Windows would demand less who would continue to upgrade their computers?
And no more hardware sales ...
It's because Microsoft is using LLMs to rewrite Windows in Rust.
A relatively heavy DE on Linux is barely 2 GB.
this isn't about memory, but back when I was in college I had a USB stick with Linux installed on it and I would just plug it into whatever computer I want to use and boot into it (luckily their computers didn't restrict the boot menu). I remember surprising a friend (who uses Windows) that the installation only took up like 3 or so GiB. He was used to Windows which has a 20 (!) GiB install size, which was larger than my entire USB stick.
I honestly don't even know what takes up all of that, it's not like the barebones installation of Windows is very rich in terms of apps.
👻 darkghost · Apr 05 at 11:35:
It's not about memory or storage. It's everything! Though Linux is guilty of some bloat too. Damn small Linux used to run in 50 MB or so and give you a functional DE, the point being it could fit on a credit card sized CD. Now damn small Linux is back, and the thing that makes it small is that it can fit on a regular 700 MB CD. At least we still have tinycore which can run on nearly 30 year old hardware.
My XUbuntu routinely downloads 500GB 'firmware updates'... What kind of firmware takes up that much and why I need it -- I will probably never know.
👻 darkghost · Apr 05 at 13:57:
Solid state storage is stored like firmware. Maybe they're just sending you your data back from the cloud.
I think they figured out how to use our drives to store cloud data.
An anticloud.
🚀 SavaRocks [OP] · Apr 05 at 18:42:
@darkghost @stack ... and the matrix begins ... welcome back Keanu Reeves
I run Debian 12 on a laptop from 2003, it is slower than in 2005, it runs the same default Debian with Xfce.
After boot, 250MB RAM is used same as in 2005, the CPU and GPU performance is lower than in 2005 probably due to the linux kernel.
I think Intel has slowed x86 chips down while counteracting heart bleed or something like that
👻 darkghost · Apr 05 at 20:25:
Whoa.
The CPU in this laptop is not affected by meldown and spectre so the mitigations are not enabled.
The default debian kernel has many features compiled in so it is more code to execute compare to the kernel from 2005 with less features.
Running htop takes 10% of the CPU.
God. is it a P4?
It is Pentium M processor, so P4 for laptops.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M
Original Post
🖥️ Reusing Old Computers with Arch Linux and DWM — Old computers don't need to die. They just need less. This is where Arch Linux and DWM come in. In 2026, reclaiming an old machine with Arch Linux and DWM means getting back a truly personal computer again. Instead of a locked-down, resource-hungry system deciding how your hardware is used, you run something minimal, transparent, and entirely under your control. Even aging hardware becomes fast, responsive, and distraction free - not because…