Mastodawn

Related to this post, I've really been wondering about this, and e-waste, and planned obsolescence for a while, and trying things I never found time to write up.... guess I'll dump my thoughts here for now.
https://discuss.systems/@csgordon/116382050700479908

In 2023 I started trying various old hardware I have laying around, including a first generation (pre-ordered!) raspberry pi zero, and the G4 (not M4) PowerBook I took to college in 2004. Both 32-bit machines with 512MB of RAM.
1/n

Colin Gordon (@[email protected])

Really starting to wonder how much RAM we really need for even heavy usage... I'm simultaneously compiling ocaml, compiling esp-generate with rust, in the memory intensive phase of a git clone (resolving deltas for a Servo checkout) and my 8GB FreeBSD system still has over half a gigabyte of memory free and is perfectly snappy. Granted I'm running Dillo rather than a major browser, and I don't expect exactly the same results to hold after I compile Servo, but... this is snappier than my 24GB M4 MacBook Pro when it's trying to open a word document. On a machine that not only has just 8GB of memory, but is also a repurposed thin client with an Intel Pentium Silver running at 1.5GHz on an M.2 SATA (not NVMe) drive. I'm not saying that more RAM or a faster drive might not make other things (like compiling Servo) faster. But...

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Colin Gordon Apr 12

Nobody really maintains the mac PPC drivers for those machines in Linux, and distributions stopped maintaining macppc ports a surprisingly short time after apple switched to Intel chips. After some digging I managed to locate a mirror of an ancient copy of Yellow Dog Linux, but I was hoping to see how productive I could be today, not just boot a machine and declare victory, so I needed something modern. Turns out if you want to run a current-day OS on a G4, the only choices are NetBSD and OpenBSD, which both still (in 2026) maintain support for those machines. (FreeBSD discontinued all 32-bit support a number of years ago.)

Options for the RPiZero are slightly less limited, as you can get various Debian derivatives (including Raspbian) for that hardware, even today. But my experience with those systems vs BSDs on newer hardware led me to focus on the BSDs first.
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Colin Gordon Apr 12

Installing OpenBSD on the G4 was just like on any other computer. Uneventful. (Beyond that installing OpenBSD always gives me vague Linux-from-Scratch vibes.) It booted. Needed a USB wifi, but that's it. Sticking to the basic window manager for light resource use, very snappy. The lack of modern browser and lack of Rust support were the main blockers for my personal longer-term use (see linked thread above, no binary packages for Firefox it Chrome variants b/c they need too much RAM for a native PPC build).
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Colin Gordon Apr 12

OpenBSD doesn't support the 32-bit RPiZero (I haven't gone spelunking to find out if it ever did; the Zero 2 is 64-bit). So for the first time I installed the third major BSD, NetBSD. It's an SBC, so there's not really an installation. It just boots. X11 works. USB wifi over a hub works. There are only about a dozen processes running by the time you get to X. It was the first time since early 00s Slackware that 'top' didn't fill the screen. Also very responsive.

Rust actually does support armv6, so I did eventually manage to compile my preferred editor (Helix), after 2 days of constantly restarting it because it kept overheating and crashing. I could have gone for better cooling, but I was also generally wary of running anything important off an SD card anyways.
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Colin Gordon

Overall this was interesting, but ultimately disappointing. The G4 Hardware *still works*. Well. After 20 years. It has actual removable memory, so I could bump it to the hardware's 2GB RAM, replace the old drive, and keep using it for a long time, in principle. It's still actually more powerful than many recent Chromebooks. In fact was so much more powerful than the Pentium III (256MB RAM) I initially played StarCraft and Diablo II on that I barely knew what to do with it. Needless to say, I did plenty of research on the Internet back then; wrote, compiled, and tested tremendous amounts of software; wrote lots of word documents and made a few slide decks. Email. All the things we do now, without any issues at all.
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Colin Gordon Apr 12

Some of this is reasonable economic forces and focusing limited human bandwidth. Nobody makes consumer PowerPC chips anymore, so of course new efforts are unlikely to target it (e.g., Rust). Fair enough. Similar factors come into play with 32-bit ARM application processors.

But much of the software support *already exists*. The only thing breaking anything beyond games is the memory consumption of modern web browsers, and to a lesser extent office software. Why does opening a brand new browser instance, freshly installed, with no open tabs spike memory consumption by 2GB? I'm aware that there's more happening in today's web browsers than 20 years ago (I used to work on a JavaScript compiler). Also the switch to 64-bit adds some overhead vs the G4 (but my old *Opteron* was still blazing fast running Firefox under Solaris or Debian, with 4GB of RAM). Because Chrome is similarly bloated (or worse), everything built with Electron (VS Code, Obsidian, Zotero, countless other things) is also bloated.
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Colin Gordon Apr 12

Do we sometimes ask computers today to do things that are genuinely beyond what those older machines could do? Sure, even focusing on typical consumer applications. Games are a big one.

But I'm not talking about asking these machines to do anything new; I'm talking about using them for things *we already know they're very capable of doing*, not just in principle but because we've already used them that way!

While I'm eager for the next AI winter, I have to wonder if prolonged pressure on RAM prices might finally push folks (companies, really) building consumer software to think "hmm, we should make sure this still runs on some machines with limited specs."
7/7(?)