I recently liberated a couple of old Intel Mac laptops by installing Linux. These machines were not receiving system updates anymore. Even on the older machine with a dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM, GNOME runs well (XFCE would probably be a better choice to save RAM for programs, though). On the newer T2 machine with 8GB of RAM, GNOME feels basically as snappy as on my modern gaming PC.

Try Google Meet. I have a similar spec Air, and that's where it falls down :'-(

Google Meet is trash. Camfrog from over a decade ago trashes it, Zoom, and any other multi-camera meeting room software. I was watching over 150 video streams at once on a Pentium 4 using Camfrog, and now you can't even have more than 5-10 before a computer starts choking.

What garbage.

Yep. My gaming desktop is an old Ryzen 5, 48GB DDR4 RAM and an old nvidia 1660 super. Plays every game I want to play just fine still at 1080p, and even a few modern titles no problem. Most of my library can be played natively at 1440p too with some settings adjustments.

I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.

> I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.

That's rather optimistic with that aging GPU. Upgrading to something like an Intel B580 (a $250 upgrade) would give it a second life however.

The B580 barely competes with a GTX1080, which I am still using.

the idea of buying a new modern card having barely the performance of a card from a decade ago seems absurd on its face.

> The B580 barely competes with a GTX1080, which I am still using.

That's nonsense, the B580 is substantially faster.

https://howmanyfps.com/graphics-cards/comparisons/geforce-gt...

I own both - there is a lot of work Arc's drivers need done to them to actually be able to use their supposed theoretical power. My GTX 1080 delivers more consistent framerates with less stuttering versus the B580.

Speed means nothing when you aren't delivering consistency.

I mean, surely this depends on what games you want to play. If you're playing mostly indies and retro games, an older desktop will be fine. If you want to play new AAA releases, probably much less so.

You don't have to go retro, just 5 to 10y old is fine.

I too built a budget gaming machine last year with a ryzen whatever it is cpu, 16GB of DDR4 and a radeon rx470 or 489 with 8GB of ram. I ignore news about new games and only buy games that are on sale and less than 20€ and everything works fine. These are AAA but not newly released ones. For example I recently started playing Skyrim for example.

You don't miss what you haven't tried.

Yeah that's pretty much what I play. Newer titles haven't interested me much lately except for a few. THis machine handles Diablo 4, Pragmata, all the elder scrolls titles, cities skylines, satisfactory, etc. just fine. Even managed to get AC:Shadows to run decently using the steam deck preset.

I hadn't considered Intel Arc though, the other comment's recommendation might be a good upgrade path for me without dropping $1k on a new GPU.

Same. And my current daily driver laptop cost me $400 9 years ago. You can still do a lot for incredibly cheap.

I bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $50 two years ago to take on a backpacking trip. It runs Linux and I use it all the time. I had a video meeting on it this morning.

You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.

Compared to current computers, the ones from 10 years ago are not that different, especially with all the software updates, unless you want an edgy graphics card or Apple processor. In terms of durability I guess the battery is the less durable part but the rest should be fine if handled with care

And with modern streaming software like Sunshine/Moonlight you can easily defer high performance tasks to a powerful machine at home. You are truly free to use any device from the last 15 years as a somewhat dumb terminal if you invest some time setting those things up... or even easier if you just need ssh.

I'm a fairly proficient linux user and I just can not get streaming to work properly and I've dedicated multiple hours to trying to set it up. The built in Steam streaming gets the closest but often just lags out for no obvious reason. Sunshine/moonlight seem to be close to working but weird display issues are constant. I've got it to the point where the steam big picture video streams perfect but when you launch a game the screen size seems to change where I can only see part of the screen on my target device.

Feels like a technology that is theoretically entirely possible but the current implementations need a lot of polish.

My 2012 thinkpad still works well.

I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.

Do you use Discord? How much time does it take to start it?

Oh boy, that app. I only use it once in a while, and it's slower and more enshittified every time. The last time I opened it, there was now a Verizon ad in the bottom left-hand corner asking me to watch a 30 second video to "win 200 Orbs!", whatever the hell that means.

The website version works fine.