I’m curious who here is using older computers to run Fedora with a full featured desktop environment. Especially curious about the oldest hardware that KDE, GNOME, and Cosmic will work with.
My daily driver is an old Lenovo ThinkStation with a 4th gen i7 running KDE. It runs so smoothly I can hardly tell the PC is 12 years old.
I’ve also got an older PC with an 1st gen i7 - I’ll give that a shot at some point with Fedora just for the fun of it. It runs Mint with Cinnamon just fine.
Given how much computers and components cost right now, I’m not highly motivated to buy anything new.
I’m using an old Dell desktop for a router/firewall. I received it in 2012 when my sister-in-law died. Not sure how long she had it. CPU is Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5200 @ 2.50GHz
It does boot to a gnome graphical login (F44), though I rarely do anything on it outside of incoming ssh sessions to manage updates.
alot of really my old hardware kicked the buckets earlier this year so i dont have anything really cool. i have this which is running fedora kde. if I remember correctly from when I bought 2 years ago its a 2019 model but it was made for company that have not move to windslop 10 from windows 7
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-6300U CPU @ 2.40GHz
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.2 GiB usable) (i added a 16gb stick that i had to make a nice 32gb)
Graphics Processor: Intel® HD Graphics 520
Manufacturer: LENOVO
System Version: ThinkPad T470 W10DG
Yes, as I said, it boots to a Gnome desktop login screen. I rarely actually log in there, but have run the settings GUI, and probably FireFox. It is Fedora 44 workstation install.
@777kaz777 - I bet an i5-6th gen with 32 GB is more than capable for running KDE. I’ve got Fedora Workstation on an i3-6th gen Thinkpad. It’s not fast, but it works as a media player.
@tkevans Nice. I just recently discovered the joys of ssh.
oh ya, runs really well for what i us it for, which is mostly as a lab/troubleshooting, simple bash or pythons scripting and light podman usage. i have tried and kind still do ran a vm some times on this makes it throttle like hell.
but I love this laptop,cause it’s so easy to repair and find replacement parts for online that dont cost a boat load of money
I was running celerons with 4GB RAM, but found that I could not run Firefox and MPV at the same time without regular crashes.
So I now recommend anything with 8GB RAM for desktop use cases.
Server can run with 1GB RAM though, depending on the workload of course.
having said that my daily driver is a itx pc that has a mix of old and new parts(well, newer that the others)
it is a r3 2200 i bought in like 2018, 8 gbs of ddr4 at just 2667mhz but i overclocked it and a a520 motherboard i bought like 2 or 3 years ago on a case i bought in 2015 with a psu from like 2019 and a m.2 from like 2018
cpu, ram, m.2 and psu are from the old gaming pc, i bought a somewhat decent am4 motherboard that still serves me well but on windows, for game compatibility reasons
@noname19 I’m much the opposite - anything newer than five years is brand spanking new to me!
I just got Fedora KDE installed on my old 1st gen i7 PC from 2009 and I’m typing this note out on it now. It’s not fast, but it’s doing fine. Running my display through an old AMD CAICOS GPU. I had to set the display refresh rate to 59.94 hz because 60 was making it look like somebody was shaking/vibrating my monitor.
i understand, my opinion comes from working in it and with crappy old pcs that are basically bombs ready to explode in the face of the next pc technician touching them, rarely a 10 year old pc on someones house has a decent psu, decent fans, decent hard disk or ssd and if it dies on you you will be blamed, so i stopped touching old machines to avoid dishonest owners telling me you touched it last, you broke it
i still have a old pc i built in 2015 but it has no case, so has no ose in it, i might revive it, that is the oldest one i still have but doing nothing in a box, older than that, i sold or gave away all machines, when i sell those, often people pay me for the ram, the rest is so old that no one wants it
I use a Late 2013 27" iMac, currently switching between LXDE and Workstation from USB3 SSD’s, which are faster than the internal spinning disk. The large screen is screen useful when switching back and forth between multiple documents.
I have a ThinkPad T450s running Fedora 44 KDE and Niri. This is a machine from 2015, and with enough memory (20 GB) and an SSD, it’s still very useable.
Up until recently, I was also using a Thinkpad X201s for travel. This is a machine from around 2010. It was OK for light use, but it runs hot (fan is on constantly), the wi-fi card isn’t able to connect to some modern networks, the screen isn’t great, and OpenGL is too old to run ghostty. So I replaced it with an X270, which is from around 2017 and is much better in every way.
I also have a ThinkPad T60p with a T61 motherboard, from around 2006, which is running Fedora. But it’s not a daily driver.
I love all these replies. Some of you have daily drivers older than my 2014 PC. Others are able to make something work that’s 20 years old.
One of the reasons I asked this is so that if anyone reads this who is contemplating throwing away their old PC and buying new because Windows 10 is no longer supported, they can see that people are still rocking decades-old computers with Fedora.
Like some of you mentioned with your old PCs, my HP from 2009 is able to run both Fedora Workstation (GNOME) and KDE. Both of those are full-featured, rich desktop environments that continue to get security and feature updates. While a PC from 2009 is not blazing fast, it’s doable for home/office email, office documents, and web browsing type work.
Specs on my 17 year old workstation:
first gen i7-860 CPU
12 GB of RAM
250 GB SSD
AMD CAICOS GPU (cost me $10 on eBay)
Wayland runs fine after changing refresh rate to 59.94 hz (before the screen refresh rate change, it had this shaky, bouncy, vibrating type of look)
I have an HP (700-210xt) from 2013 running just fine with Fedora44 and KDE desktop. I’m pretty sure I added more memory years ago. it has 16GB now.
Additionally, we have an HP G62 Notebook from 2010 that I upgraded to 8GB memory also with Fedora44 and KDE.
it would be interesting to know if there’s a recommended vendor for the last-lasting machines: I see HP and (IBM/Lenovo?) ThinkPads mentioned a few times.
PS: I installed Fedora44 on a 7 year old chromebook with only 4Gb ram that runs fine for your everyday tasks like email but struggles with some web sites, of course. unfortunately I can’t upgrade the memory there. but the KDE desktop itself works nicely.
Built a franken-Xeon (E5-2680 v4) with a Chinese motherboard out of curiosity and it’s now my daily driver, replacing the aging Steamroller APU build I used previously. Broadwell-EP – the Xeon in question – was released in 2014, and is surprisingly quite performant.
For context: Broadwell IPC was AMD’s aim with 1st gen Ryzen, who was behind 40%+ at the time, which means that I gained 40%+ more performance per clock with this replacement. It’s a sidegrade-but-not-really situation.
