On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 03:19:42PM -0500, Michael Shell wrote: > > Another angle is the obsolescence of the *hardware* itself. Has anyone > attempted to maintain a very latest system on older hardware, and if so, > what was the result - increasing slowness due to ever increasing demands > on the hardware, or is this at least partly countered by coding > improvements? How does GTK3 fare in this regard compared to GTK2? > On this point, my first amd64 had a massive 1GB of memory (I suspect it was still 133 MHz). When I first managed to install a version of almost-LFS on it (that was before cross-lfs had become a separate project), I ran some benchmarks on it and confirmed that for those (ssl tests, probably some ogg encoding : imagine that - using a lossy format because disk space was limited!) it was indeed faster than using it as i686. By the time I got rid of it a couple of years ago, I was thinking about moving it back to i686 because compilation of userspace was so slow and needed so much memory : for that, I blame each new minor version of gcc ;)
For use as a desktop (_my_ usage, no Desktop Environments) it still worked adequately but compilation had become beyond a joke. I've also built a more-featured 7.6 desktop (much of xfce) on my atom netbook - it mostly runs ok, but compiling firefox-34.0.5 took over 10 hours. In general, if you are compiling then a well-specified recent system makes things much less painful. OTOH, audio capabilities of modern hardware are often lacking - one of my machines was a mac ppc64 (we all make mistakes) and networking was not its strongpoint so I re-encoded some ogg rips to a lower sampling rate to lessen its problems (playing music from an nfs share while compiling often stuttered before I did that). Similarly, I have some low-frequency example .au files. On my most recent hardware, none of these are playable, only audio at 44K1 or 48K. ĸen -- Nanny Ogg usually went to bed early. After all, she was an old lady. Sometimes she went to bed as early as 6 a.m. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
