Adding yet again to my collection of EndeavourOS-based machines, a while back I was given outright an old HP 14-cm0046nr Ryzen 4 (dual core) notebook. Wiped Windows 10 immediately and installed Endeavour. Even with Endeavour on it, the 4g of memory plus mechanical HD made it a little not-great, though it was passable. I replaced the 500g spinner drive with a super-low-end 110g ssd from team somebody, used, for $10. Doubtless it may die any day, but I’m not keeping anything I care about on this rig. Just for fun / experimentation.
I also, just yesterday, tossed in a lone 8g memory simm purchased for $12 all in. (There’s only one slot on this minimalist critter, so 8g is as high as it goes according to HP.) This did improve the glitchiness of things considerably.
Everything else? Sound is great on the default KDE desktop, and all function keys work as intended. Screen sucks, (the 1380x? display has very stringent viewing angles and colors are washed out by higher brightness) but should we be surprised? Nah.
Keyboard on this is surprising nice. Lots of ports, including an ethernet plug. No usb c but yes to an hdmi along with 3 usb ports and even a sim card reader. And the nicest thing of all? It hardly even gets warm. Seriously, the coolest running computer in my collection.
If you want to rescue some old school machine (this one had a sticker from Chicago City Colleges on it), Endeavour is a great way to do it.
AMD A4-9125 is more than 10 years old laptop having been launched in the year 2012. How are you able to run KDE on this machine? Are you using an older version of KDE? or are you using LXQT?
Is it laggy? or do the applications take time to launch?
I concur, that’s how I initially got into this wonderful distro and community. I wanted to rescue an old Lenovo Ideapad laptop which was struggling to even run windows 7 properly. This was back in 2020. It’s still running the same install of to this day.
I bet with 8GB of RAM a faster SSD and a Dualcore CPU it will run KDE/Plasma just fine, i bet it is not able to do heavy liftings like compiling kernel or such.
But to be used as a general purpose Webbrowing machine it should run fine
Its because of cooling issues, same as MacBooks. If you want to make the RAM modular and upgradable, the laptops can’t be thin. Also you can get better performance with ram and CPU in a single block.
This fascination with thinness is going to cost us dearly in terms of upgradability and right to fix it. Dont see these soldered CPU+RAM machines lasting for more than 6-7 years. Very soon we will not even be able to dual boot or install Linux at all.
For everyday tasks, KDE runs perfectly on even older harware. The oldest I run it now is a Dell Latitude D630 from way back, 2007. Pure, mighty, glorious EndeavourOS KDE desktop on an Intel core duo.
Mostly I launch firefox… and it isn’t laggy. I mean, compared to my Dell XPS 7590 it is slower… but a student would be just fine with it. Not laggy. And yes, I’m using the latest Endeavour Mercury w/ KDE desktop.
Oh my god. You guys are rescuing hardware which I would not touch with a barge pole. 2007, 2012 hardware? I call it quits when the hardware goes beyond 9-10 years.
Haha my use case back then was I needed a secondary computer and Windows 7 wasn’t working on it at all and it was hanging a lot. So really rescued it. I didn’t want to spend money on a new computer. But life had different plans. For some reason (probably @Pudge ) I got a Raspberry Pi and now I have a collection of SBCs (Pi, Odroid N2+, Rock5B) and Arm based laptops (including Pinebook Pro and Lenovo Slim 7x).
So I don’t need that old laptop (Lenovo IdeaPad) anymore. Hence my lack of use for it. I’m using Pinebook Pro instead.
I cheerfully admit that most tech does eventually age out of usefulness. Or, at lesat it used to. I have an old G4 MacBook that is in excellent condition. For some reason I bought it at a yard sale for 20 bucks last year. I’ve played with it enough to know I’ll probably never get serious, even playfully, again with it for maybe ever. On the other hand, I have a small fleet of MacBook Pros 15 and 13 that people keep giving me and I keep feeling need to be made better. This isn’t quite right in the head behavior. But I do love those machines. And esp. with Linux on 'em. The difference between that G4 and the 2012 machine is that, well, the latter still can run - and run decently quickly - everyday software including both Firefox and LibreOffice and… well, you know. The usage curve has not really changed that much from 2012 to now re the software one wants every day. It has changed from, well whenever that G4 was made and now. It’s late and I hope this makes sense. But yes, there’s “older” and then there’s just… meh. No thanks. We each have our year beyond which we will not pass, I suppose. For me, 2010 is really pushing it (though I just got a 25 buck hi res matte screen for a 2010 15" MacBook Pro). Heh.
Right now I am once again typing on the HP Notebook, and spent the day typing on my original Endeavour OS project, my 11" C740 Acer Chromebook. I do marvel at how useable they all are.
And let me add one vital caveat: SSD!!! If the machine cannot be upgraded from a spinner drive to an ssd, it ain’t worth it for me. Old machines become virtually new machines once an ssd is added.
Yes without SSD it is useless to try to rescue a old low-end laptop. But that brings an interesting point to the fore. What about an old laptop that already has a SSD and it needs to be rescued. Then what? Wear leveling would have reduced the performance of the SSD, as typically all SSD’s performance degrades with time, So in that sense does it make sense to rescue a old laptop which already had an inbuilt SATA SSD drive?
The drive, even degraded to a degree, still runs waaay faster than a spinner drive… but is it too slow for the user?
The drive is dinky and/or slow even as an ssd. Replacing it will still be a fraction of what a new computer would cost.
The drive is not great and the computer itself is sucky for other reasons. Maybe buy another old machine, but one that is proven (say, a Lenovo X1 Carbon from five years back?). Toss Endeavour on that and all is well. I bought a 5th gen one of those for around 100 bucks last year off ebay.
The computer is just new enough that tossing a 15 buck ssd into it is worth the effort. I’m a sucker for this one. Because “worth the effort” for me is often just finding that I’ve rescued the machine and made it useable in 2025. (Others, I hasten to add, might think I’ve failed.)
to this day.