Hmmm I always wanted to breathe new life into an old laptop with a FOSS OS.
Sounds fun. All the laptop I have lying around don't have chargers for them and are effectively useless.
Good luck to you and your newish old FreeBSD laptop!
Yesterday I installed FreeBSD on an old laptop from 2011 that's been sitting in storage. It was originally a Windows machine, but when the OS was upgraded, I couldn't get technical support for it anymore, so I abandoned it. I've used FreeBSD on servers before, but never in a graphics environment like this. I had a hard time installing drivers for the old graphics card, but eventually managed to get an Xfce desktop environment up and running.
It's useless as a Windows machine, but I've installed FreeBSD on it and it's pretty good. I wouldn't use it as a daily driver because it's too heavy to carry around, but I'm going to try it as a sub-desktop at home.
~> neofetch
`` ` monpetit@hermes
` `.....---.......--.``` -/ ---------------
+o .--` /y:` +. OS: FreeBSD 14.0-STABLE amd64
yo`:. :o `+- Uptime: 1 hour, 38 mins
y/ -/` -o/ Packages: 487 (pkg)
.- ::/sy+:. Shell: fish 3.6.1
/ `-- / Resolution: 1600x900
`: :` DE: Xfce4 4.18
`: :` WM: Xfwm4
/ / WM Theme: Default
.- -. Theme: Adwaita [GTK3]
-- -. Icons: elementary-xfce [GTK2], Adwaita [GTK3]
`:` `:` Terminal: xfce4-terminal
.-- `--. Terminal Font: Monospace 12
.---.....----. CPU: Intel i5-2520M (4) @ 2.494GHz
GPU: GF119M [Quadro NVS 4200M]
Memory: 3476MiB / 8132MiB
Hmmm I always wanted to breathe new life into an old laptop with a FOSS OS.
Sounds fun. All the laptop I have lying around don't have chargers for them and are effectively useless.
Good luck to you and your newish old FreeBSD laptop!
big tip i've seen recently with old laptops: you can use them pretty easily as media servers!
Linux is a beautiful thing. Breathe new life into old hardware, Please do keep us updated on sub-desktop situation after a while.
I already have Linux Mint installed on two machines for work. This time I wanted to try something a little different. I actually tried to install HaikuOS on that machine first, but it failed after a few tries because it couldn't catch the graphics card driver. I'll have to recharge and try again next time. :)
i also gave haiku a try recently. my requirements were 1) a terminal and 2) a competant browser
unfortunately the browser requirement wasn't met (lol), so i ended up going with linux mint for the first time. so far so good!
if haiku ever gets a browser (or two i can toggle between) that work well with the sites i use most, i'd certainly be *tempted* to have another go with it.
~bartender, one mint julep, please :-)