Hello, good morning.
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I have created this page as an EASY TO FIND and DIRECT SOURCE to allow anyone (me included) to understand how to handle Legacy Hardware (which still exists and will keep getting used until it all breaks down forever) with newer software.
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Obviously, there are MANY differences even among “legacy”, because a 2002 computer and a 2012 computer are VERY different.
[This page will Focus on Fedora for obvious reasons, but a lot of what is said here will still apply to most other Linux Distros.]
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This page will focus on anything released since the Pentium 4 onwards (not before 2000) because basically all “normal” Distros require CPU Instruction Sets which may not even exist prior the Pentium 4!
[ Just to make an example, software like Steam requires a Pentium 4 at minimum because of the SSE2 requirement; I couldn’t easily find info on Google, but according to this video at 04:13 it will not run on anything older than a Pentium 4.]
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So:
As long as there are enough resources, Linux Distros don’t really care about the CPU, RAM and MOBO of the system; the storage solution and the way it’s connected (IDE or SATA, HDD or SSD) also are not crucial.
The main issue one will face is the GPU support.
(Be it a proper dedicated GPU or an iGPU; Legacy AMD and Intel will tend to play better and easier with Linux compared to Nvidia, so Nvidia will tend to be the focus of attention for this page, without ignoring Intel and AMD iGPUs tho.)
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I am gonna say this here loud and clear: SOME Legacy Nvidia GPUs MAY work fine enough, at least for normal Desktop use, like Libre Office and Internet navigation, on modern Fedora (Wayland) with the Nouveau driver.
You will NOT be “le epic gaming” with a GTX 780ti, but if that’s not your goal then at least this works.
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Let’s tackle this with a practical example:
I am working with a old All In One PC.
It came out with Windows 7 and has a TouchScreen.
[The inxi -Fzxx data will be uploaded soon, I can’t work with it right now.]
Its CPU is the E5300, it has 2gb of (maybe) DDR2 and all is mounted on a Pegatron IPM 31 Motherboard.
It had a 7200RPM 300gb SATA HDD as storage and no dedicated GPU.
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I got my old GT 710 (1gb GDDR5) in there and a SSD to install Fedora KDE (X11 is going the way of the dodo, so “switcing to Xorg_11” as a suggestion won’t actually help in this case, this is the purpose of this post) with the goal to see how modern Linux actually fairs on such hardware.
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For now I left the default Nouveau driver installed. The computer works without any graphical glitch, at least as far as I was able to see.
Any performance problem is mainly due that Fedora KDE ain’t the lightest Operating System one could have chosen to install.
The 2gb of [maybe] DDR2 RAM are more of a factor to its problems than the GT 710
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[Me trying to maybe upgrade the RAM from 2 to 4 or 6 gb aside…]
What I want to focus on is the GPU.
Anyone with basic reading comprehension can understand what’s being said here, so here’s something different:
My goal is to make the GPU work somewhat better, but for what I’ve read NVIDIA works under Wayland (and Xwayland) starting with Fedora 35 and NVIDIA driver 495 and later. and “Wayland isn’t well supported on Drivers before 550” (and the GT 710’s latest drivers are the 470, from 2021).
This means that if someone is in my same situation, the solution to get more power out of it would be to move over to a X11 Distro and lose support for at least some software in the future, or keep the GPU on Nouveau and its performance too, hoping for Nouveau to still work on the GPU for as long as it doesn’t eventually break.
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If someone wants to try installing the Legacy drivers for the GT 710 they would not work with Wayland.
Sense or not, for the sake of informating oneself, if anyone ever wanted to test such drivers in the most painless way possible, is there a way to change between multiple drivers and/or recover from “bad drivers” other than the methods described by RPM?
This is the method RPM describes to have multiple drivers and this is the “Uninstall and Recover” instructions (which I followed once when I was fooling around with another PC).
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To make myself clear about “recovering from bad drivers”,
if one was to install either the drivers from here or the official Nvidia drivers (not adviced, but still an option), other than the “Uninstall and Recover” instructions, is there another way to “fix a mistake”?
Could there be an easier, more convenient way, like “making a backup/image of the system”, which then either Fedora (the OS) can use to “return the drivers back to the reference” or can be used to overwrite the Storage (if external, like the good old days) or to “jump back to” (like one can chose which version of the Kernel to boot into)?
