2023-03-07 from the editor of ~insom
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I put Haiku on an old laptop I thrifted. It's been fun, so
far.
Putting it on a 4x3 screen feels appropriate. The aesthetics
of this Dell actually feel even more dated than the laptop
actually is (this could be a late 90's laptop apart from the
two (2) USB ports it includes). This somehow suits Haiku
very well, and Haiku runs well on it.
On one hand, I can't think of much that would be good to run
on a Pentium M anymore -- it came with XP -- but actually I
think I approach this from the other side: It would be a
waste to install Haiku on a powerful modern machine. It
feels like I am going with the grain -- it will use
512Mbytes of RAM happily, and that's what I've got. It's not
like cramming modern Linux (plus a lot of swap).
Anyway, justification aside -- I have also left a spinning
disk in there -- it seems silly to find an IDE SSD and put
one in there. While I don't miss these slow things for
_real_ work, there's something interesting about having one
in a machine again. I don't think I've had a machine with a
spinning boot drive for 10 years.
Now I get an affordance: when I click on a link without a
browser open, I hear the disk paging in the binary before
the window appears a second or two later. It's like haptic
feedback that the machine is doing something. I wasn't aware
how much I miss this on modern machines when it seems that
software just sticks for a bit and I am not sure if it
registered my click, is spinning the CPU, waiting on the
network or whatever.
Again: not recommending a renaissance of HDDs or anything,
but it's interesting to see one aspect of what we lost with
SSDs. Like how LED traffic lights don't get hot enough to
melt snow -- sometimes the _shortcomings_ of the old tech
were a hidden advantage all along.
