On Mon, 06 Jan 2014 12:23:52 -0500, Larry Stotler wrote:
I've always advocated reusing computers & I've been continually frustrated by the Linux community as a whole recently because they keep pushing software that takes more resources. Linux was always held up as the poster child for keeping alive older hardware, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Depends on what you want and need. If you don't want/need all the fancy UI elements that KDE or GNOME provide, then it actually runs pretty well. I'm speaking as someone who's running both openELEC and openSUSE 13.1 on a RPi.
Then something like the underpowered Raspberry Pi comes out & people fall all over themselves to add support for it. For not much more than the cost of a RPi, I can pick up a cheap Pentium 3 laptop off eBay, which would have same as or more RAM(The RPi originally only came with 26MB, but 512MB is now standard), better expansion & have basically a whole computer that's better supported and much faster(I doubt that the armv6 core in the RPi is faster than a P3/500 at most things).
Well, if you want to pick up a cheap laptop, do so - the RPi port is a community project, and is something that community members have decided to work on. There's no commercial (read: SUSE) interest in the port at all. I find the current 13.1 image to be pretty snappy, actually. I've got it running e17, and it's quite usable. I paid about $100 for my total kit (including case, power supply, wireless-N adapter, sdcard, breadboard, gpio cable, and a few electronic components). openSUSE is on a 32 GB microsd card that I bought for my tablet to run Cyanogen on, but the card wasn't actually capable (higher power requirement than the tablet provides, apparently), so I got one that was compatible and had this one kicking around. NFS for disk storage on my existing systems. HDMI out connected to the projector in our TV room. Mine runs on a 10' screen, no monitor purchase required. It's not a question of it being worth more effort, it's a question of "this is what a certain group of people are interested in doing, so they're doing it." That's what a community distribution does: People are interested in making it work and are putting the time into it. You want to support an older laptop? Go ahead, nothing's stopping you from organizing like-minded individuals and making it happen. :) Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org