3 ms·

is there any reason they are still using i386 hardware? i can think of a million reasons to upgrade but not many to stay

snvzz 5y ago
It's a laptop with a 32bit cpu. It works for its task, as well as it did when it was purchased. It uses very little power. It has an integrated UPS (laptop's battery). There's absolutely no reason for them to retire that hardware and buy something newer to replace it.
slackfan 5y ago
Not polluting the planet and being a rampant consumer for one is a very good reason not to upgrade. If one is to actually use a computer not as a glorified web terminal, you'll find that for most things that aren't video/audio/image editing computing power really stopped being relevant after about 1998.
- rhexs 5y ago
  An i386 will use more power than a far cheaper server that’s still 100x as powerful. It would be more “sustainable” to upgrade.
  - slackfan 5y ago
    Kind of had to beat a 2W power draw, tbph.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- anthk 5y ago
  Image editing can be fast enough on a Pentium 3/4 up to 1280x800 and imagemagick. For audio/video, a Pentium 3 or similar would be enough with a good video card, some mplayer/mpv settings to skip the loop filter on decoding and video should be good enough up to 720p on Pentium 4 with SSE2 or pre 2010 Celerons. Celerons from 2010 and beyond can play 108p at 30FPS without sweating. EDIT: I use Slackware and OpenBSD too :D. Fluxbox, Rox, XTerm, Mocp, Djview, MuPDF, Groff+MS, Bitlbee+sic... you don't need a high end machine, for sure. For Rox: mkdir ~/lib cd ~/lib git clone https://github.com/jun7/VideoThumbnail mkdir -p ~/tmp cd ~/tmp git clone https://repo.or.cz/rox-lib.git cd rox-lib cp -r ROX-Lib2 ~/lib Done. Add Zukitre for GTK2/3 themes, the Zukitre theme for Fluxbox (I have a fork for the theme with better settings), lxappearance and maybe Elementary/Tango2+Tango icons as a base for Tango2 icons, and you'll have an elegant and blazing fast desktop. If any, you can install fbmenugen and config it to set some automatic XDG menu entries and some of them to suspend/hibernate your laptop.
  - slackfan 5y ago
    I still have an old G4 powermac hanging around to do most of my image and audio editing in under (gasp) OS9 no less. I can still do huge modern-pixel-count images with Photoshop 6 just fine, because I don't really care about 10bit color or whatever the hell the kids are up to these days. But then again, we're talking about computers, not media consumption machines.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
It could be for reliability reasons as well, Something which was running for decades in a low-maintenance environment can be expected to continue doing so unlike modern semiconductors which are iterated and manufactured at very high volume that longevity is questionable. I've been burned by semiconductors earlier due to bad design/manufacturing e.g. Pentium-D, SD 810 etc. Also with current semiconductor shortage/supply chain issues/inflation, Anything to re-use (or) re-purpose old compute hardware is valuable to many.
ben_bai 5y ago
OpenBSD runs on a lot of different platforms, and for inclusion into base it has to run on every platform. A few years ago this meant even on a VAX. The most "obscure" platform today might be luna88k(m88k).

snvzz 5y ago

It's a laptop with a 32bit cpu. It works for its task, as well as it did when it was purchased. It uses very little power. It has an integrated UPS (laptop's battery). There's absolutely no reason for them to retire that hardware and buy something newer to replace it.

slackfan 5y ago

Not polluting the planet and being a rampant consumer for one is a very good reason not to upgrade. If one is to actually use a computer not as a glorified web terminal, you'll find that for most things that aren't video/audio/image editing computing power really stopped being relevant after about 1998.

rhexs 5y ago
An i386 will use more power than a far cheaper server that’s still 100x as powerful. It would be more “sustainable” to upgrade.
- slackfan 5y ago
  Kind of had to beat a 2W power draw, tbph.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
anthk 5y ago
Image editing can be fast enough on a Pentium 3/4 up to 1280x800 and imagemagick. For audio/video, a Pentium 3 or similar would be enough with a good video card, some mplayer/mpv settings to skip the loop filter on decoding and video should be good enough up to 720p on Pentium 4 with SSE2 or pre 2010 Celerons. Celerons from 2010 and beyond can play 108p at 30FPS without sweating. EDIT: I use Slackware and OpenBSD too :D. Fluxbox, Rox, XTerm, Mocp, Djview, MuPDF, Groff+MS, Bitlbee+sic... you don't need a high end machine, for sure. For Rox: mkdir ~/lib cd ~/lib git clone https://github.com/jun7/VideoThumbnail mkdir -p ~/tmp cd ~/tmp git clone https://repo.or.cz/rox-lib.git cd rox-lib cp -r ROX-Lib2 ~/lib Done. Add Zukitre for GTK2/3 themes, the Zukitre theme for Fluxbox (I have a fork for the theme with better settings), lxappearance and maybe Elementary/Tango2+Tango icons as a base for Tango2 icons, and you'll have an elegant and blazing fast desktop. If any, you can install fbmenugen and config it to set some automatic XDG menu entries and some of them to suspend/hibernate your laptop.
- slackfan 5y ago
  I still have an old G4 powermac hanging around to do most of my image and audio editing in under (gasp) OS9 no less. I can still do huge modern-pixel-count images with Photoshop 6 just fine, because I don't really care about 10bit color or whatever the hell the kids are up to these days. But then again, we're talking about computers, not media consumption machines.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

It could be for reliability reasons as well, Something which was running for decades in a low-maintenance environment can be expected to continue doing so unlike modern semiconductors which are iterated and manufactured at very high volume that longevity is questionable. I've been burned by semiconductors earlier due to bad design/manufacturing e.g. Pentium-D, SD 810 etc. Also with current semiconductor shortage/supply chain issues/inflation, Anything to re-use (or) re-purpose old compute hardware is valuable to many.

ben_bai 5y ago

OpenBSD runs on a lot of different platforms, and for inclusion into base it has to run on every platform. A few years ago this meant even on a VAX. The most "obscure" platform today might be luna88k(m88k).