I recently did some experiments with “old” hardware – a Skylake i5-6500T mini pc running Debian 12 with KDE Plasma, configured so that I can use it either as a stand-in replacement for my home server, or a fully set up Linux desktop for myself in case I need it for something; I don’t know, if both Microsoft and Apple make their operating systems non-functional at the same time for some reason. I intentionally left the machine with 8GB RAM just to see if it’s enough, and it seems to be more than enough for the server, where it uses up 1.4GB, and barely sufficient for desktop, where it uses up almost all the RAM when I run all the things that I normally do. It’s all quite snappy, but I did notice one thing; when I play videos on YouTube on full screen, or even when I’m using one of the high-bandwidth modes such as 1080p@60, it frame drops like crazy and is as smooth as a country road in Siberia during the melt season. My first guess was that the Skylake iGPU doesn’t support the modern codecs used by YouTube for those high bandwidth modes, but then I thought more about it and decided it might be a Linux issue. I didn’t feel like installing Windows on that machine just to test my hypothesis, so I took out the second device I recently got on ebay, the Thinkpad T14 with i5-10310U, a Comet Lake CPU with support for all the modern codecs. Played that same 4k video test on Win11, with perfect results, zero frame drops. Then I rebooted into Ubuntu 24.04, same test, and it frame drops almost the same as the Skylake machine.
I did all the recommended stuff on Linux; tried different browsers, tried to toggle GPU acceleration on and off, and the only thing I managed to do is make it behave worse, not better.
Switch to Linux they say, you’ll solve all your Microsoft problems they say. Well it’s true, you’ll solve your Microsoft problems, and instead of Microsoft you’ll have problems caused by thousands of pimply masturbators with attitude issues who can’t agree on the colour of shit, which is why there are hundreds of Linux distros and they all have the same issues, because polishing the GPU drivers and the window manager is hard. But the important thing is that the Linux community is getting rid of “nazis” who think there are only two genders, and at the same time they get rid of Russian developers because “stand with Ukraine”.
Yeah. The frustrating thing about Linux is that so many things work well, and then you run into something important like this. Maybe Huawei will rework Linux into something that actually works well, and give it wider hardware support and localisation, doing for Linux desktop what Android did for mobile. Maybe. However then America is going to block it because they won’t be able to install their spyware.
One might ask what's the purpose of obsolete laptop hardware packed into a mini pc, especially today when the performance of modern machines is amazing and you're really missing out if you haven't tried them.
However, performance is relative, and for some purposes, I don't need that much of it; I just need enough to run certain tasks. For instance, here's the specs of the danijel.org web/mail server:
1GB RAM, 4GB swap
1 core virtual CPU
24GB main drive, 8GB additional drive for user uploads (all SSD)
You'll say, what?? Yeah, it's an Amazon AWS virtual machine, and it runs everything just fine. Blog, forum, books, archives, it's all in there. As it turns out, you don't need that much power if you're not running a desktop environment. In comparison, a 6-core i5 with 20GB RAM and a 500GB SSD, running my home linux server, is a fire-breathing beast, but it's three times slower than my M4 Macbook Air, and as it turns out, I actually need the difference in power when I'm in Lightroom. However, when I ssh into the home server, it's incredibly responsive, everything runs instantaneously; if anything, it's an absolute overkill for the task, which is why I got an even older quad-core mini pc as a backup, in case of unexpected hardware failure. Guess what, the difference between 4 and 6 cores, and between 20 and 8 GB RAM, is imperceptible in practice.
What's actually perceptible is the difference in reliability between a Raspberry Pi 4 I had before, and those HP mini pc solutions. The Raspberry Pi had to be rebooted every night at midnight because the USB SATA SSD for some reason unmounted itself periodically, and the micro SD card that was the system drive was super slow and eventually wore itself out enough to fail, fortunately in read-only mode so I could rescue the data from it. Also, it didn't support conventional hardware – no SATA, no NVMe, just a lot of bullshit, and it actually got expensive once you set it up with everything it needed to run. In comparison, a HP mini PC is super easy to live with. It's faster, has normal components (DDR4 SODIMM RAM, NVMe drives), and the power consumption is around 5W in normal operation. A conventional outdated big PC with a big power draw would be impractical today, but a mini PC with laptop hardware and very low power draw, that's an excellent server.
I found an old SSD to install Win10 on (because i5-6500T doesn't support Win11) and did the youtube video test there, and it's almost as glitchy and framedroppy as Linux, so yeah, those high-bandwidth codecs are too much for Skylake iGPU. So, not all problems can be solved by moving from Linux to Windows. 🙂
So, I'm thinking, if you have a CPU that's unsupported by Win11, is it a better idea to switch to Linux, stay on Windows 10, or simply upgrade your hardware? Honestly, I don't know. I'm running that system on Linux and I bought it as a home server, and if I had to run it as a desktop, I would still use Linux, regardless of the codec issues. But that's me; I know my way around Linux.