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Honestly, I've found that my compute needs have been surpassed quite a while ago, and so I could easily get away with buying a $300 computer.
Honestly, for real, a lot of low-power PCs are really useful once they have crap like Windows off of them and a lightweight Linux distro on them.
Exactly. Get yourself a somewhat low-end PC, wipe windows, and install Linux Mint, and you're pretty much golden.
Did exactly this with an old laptop and use to mainly for tv and occasionally browsing when staying at our hut/cottage? Still bit slow but works.
I've found my preferences have been creeping up in price again, but only because I've found I want an actually physically lightweight laptop, and those have been getting more available, linux-able and capable.
I only need a few hundred dollars worth of computer, and anything more can live on a rack somewhere. I'll pay more than that for my computer to be light enough I don't need to think about.
Up until the early 2000s, serial computation speed doubled about every 18 months. That meant that virtually all software just ran twice as quickly every 18 months of CPU advances. And since taking advantage of that was trivial, new software releases did, traded CPU cycles for shorter development time or more functionality, demanded current hardware to run at a reasonable clip.
In that environment, it was quite important to upgrade the CPU.
But that hasn't been happening for about twenty years now. Serial computation speed still increases, but not nearly as quickly any more.
This is about ten years old now:
https://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-cpu-performance/
Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, CPUs were able to run virtually any kind of software twice as fast every 18-20 months. The rate of change was incredible. Your 486SX-16 was almost obsolete by the time you got it through the door. But eventually, at some point in the mid-2000’s, progress slowed down considerably for single-threaded software – which was most software.
Perhaps the turning point came in May 2004, when Intel canceled its latest single-core development effort to focus on multicore designs. Later that year, Herb Sutter wrote his now-famous article, The Free Lunch Is Over. Not all software will run remarkably faster year-over-year anymore, he warned us. Concurrent software would continue its meteoric rise, but single-threaded software was about to get left in the dust.
If you’re willing to trust this line, it seems that in the eight years since January 2004, mainstream performance has increased by a factor of about 4.6x, which works out to 21% per year. Compare that to the 28x increase between 1996 and 2004! Things have really slowed down.
We can also look at about the twelve years since then, which is even slower:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/2026vs6296/Intel-i7-4960X-vs-Intel-Ultra-9-285K
This is using a benchmark to compare the single-threaded performance of the i7 4960X (Intel's high-end processor back at the start of 2013) to that of the Intel Ultra 9 285K, the current one. In those ~12 years, the latest processor has managed to get single-threaded performance about (5068/2070)=~2.448 times the 12-year-old processor. That's (5068/2070)^(1/12)=1.07747, about a 7.7% performance improvement per year. The age of a processor doesn't matter nearly as much in that environment.
We still have had significant parallel computation increases. GPUs in particular have gotten considerably more powerful. But unlike with serial compute, parallel compute isn't a "free" performance improvement -- software needs to be rewritten to take advantage of that, it's often hard to parallelize solving problems, and some problems cannot be solved in parallel.
Honestly, I'd say that the most-noticeable shift is away from rotational drives to SSDs -- there are tasks for which SSDs can greatly outperform rotational drives.
You know, that would explain a lot because I had no idea that there was an authentication pin and that's total bullshit.
I bought a former office HP EliteDesk 800 G2 16GB for $120 on eBay or Amazon (can’t recall) 2 years ago with the intention of it just being my server. I ended up not unhooking the monitor and leaving it on my desk since it’s plenty fast for my needs. No massive PC gaming rig but it plays Steam indie titles and even 3D modeling and slicing apps at full speed. I just haven’t needed to get anything else.
Being blind, I don't play video games and don't do any kind of 3D graphics and stuff like that. So many, many computers would fit my specifications.
Edit: My laptop right now is a Dell Latitude E5400 from like 2014 with eight gigabytes of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive with an Intel Core i5 and it works well enough. Honestly, the only problem with it is that it does not charge the battery. So as soon as it is unplugged from the wall, it just dies. And it's not the battery itself because I've tried getting new batteries for it. It's something in the charging circuitry. It works fine when it's on wall power, but it just does not charge the battery. I figure with it being 10 years old already, at some point I will have to replace it.
It’s something in the charging circuitry. It works fine when it’s on wall power, but it just does not charge the battery.
And it’s not the battery itself because I’ve tried getting new batteries for it. It’s something in the charging circuitry. It works fine when it’s on wall power, but it just does not charge the battery.
At least some Dell laptops authenticate to the charger so that only "authentic Dell chargers" can charge the battery, though they'll run off third-party chargers without charging the battery.
Unfortunately, it's a common problem -- and I've seen this myself -- for the authentication pin on an "authentic Dell charger" to become slightly bent or something, at which it will no longer authenticate and the laptop will refuse to charge the battery.
I bet the charger on yours is a barrel charger with that pin down the middle.
hits Amazon
Yeah, looks like it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086VYSZVL?psc=1
I don't have a great picture for the 65W one, but the 45W charger here has an image looking down the charger barrel showing that internal pin.
If you want to keep using that laptop and want to use the battery, I'd try swapping out the charger. If you don't have an official Dell charger, make sure that the one you get is one of those (unless some "universal charger" has managed to break their authentication scheme in the intervening years; I haven't been following things).
EDIT: Even one of the top reviews on that Amazon page mentions it:
I have a DELL, that has the straight barrel plug with the pin in it. THEY REALLY made a BAD DECISION when they made these DELL laptops with that type of plug instead of making it with a dog leg style plug. I have to replace my charger cord A LOT because the pin gets bent inside and it stops charging at that plug, but the rest of the charger is still good...
Oh hey, I have question for you then. Are you using any braille system with your computer? Or is it a kind of voice reader thing you have going on? What do you use for reading posts and comments on Lemmy?
I use my phone a lot more frequently than I use my computer and I use the TalkBack screen reader on my phone primarily. I can read and write Braille of course and have been able to do so since I was a little kid but I don't do it very often primarily because I've always found reading to be slow for me and so I prefer audio. I'm able to better absorb information through audio than through reading it directly and always have been.
Edit: I'm not totally blind so my primary navigation is through memorization of where things are and then to read posts and stuff like that that's long I use the screen reader. So, for example, on my home screen, I know where I've placed my app icons, so I can just easily navigate to them, and in settings, for example, I know roughly where the menus are that I'm looking for, and so can navigate to them quickly. I also use the magnification gestures a lot. So, primarily, I navigate with memorization, magnification gestures, and screen reader for longer stuff.
I was that way for the longest time. I was more than content with my 4 core 8 thread 4th Gen. i7 laptop. I only upgraded to an 11th Gen. i9 system because I wanted to play some games on the go.
But after I upgraded to that system I started to do so much more, and all at once. Mostly because I actually could, and the old system would cry in pain long before then. But Mid last year I finally broke and bought a 13th Gen. i9 system to replace it and man do I flog the shit out of this computer. Just having the spare power lying around made me want to do more and more with it.
For real, I'm happily using an APU for 90% of the time. I barely need a dedicated GPU at all any more. I use Mint btw.
Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn’t.
And why is that?
Project DIGITS features the new NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, offering a petaflop of AI computing performance for prototyping, fine-tuning and running large AI models.
With the Grace Blackwell architecture, enterprises and researchers can prototype, fine-tune and test models on local Project DIGITS systems running Linux-based NVIDIA DGX OS, and then deploy them seamlessly on NVIDIA DGX Cloud™, accelerated cloud instances or data center infrastructure.
Oh, because it's not a fucking consumer product. It's for enterprises that need a cheap supercomputer
NVCC is still proprietary and full of telemetry. You cannot build CUDA without it.
*monkey paw closes*
But it's just for AI bullshit.
I don't care why they got their shit together, I'm happy as long as they fix the open source drivers.
Where's the PC? Is it the brick on the desk? 🤣
Well, it's still a modified custom distro and other distros will need to invest extra effort to be able to run there. So, no actual freedom of choice for users again...
Don't get too excited -- if this goes like the last few NVidia hardware, it will:
- cost too much
- run a non-mainline kernel
- NVidia will discontinue support for it after 3 months
Go talk to all the Jetson owners out there and see how happy they are with NVidia Linux boxes. I'll believe it when I see it (and when it is supported for longer than a quarter)
I hope to see some nice Risc-V PCs soon
Or you can just buy any random potato computer (or assemble it yourself from stuff you found) and still run Linux on it.
Haven't they been making things like the Jetson AGX for years? I guess this is an announcement of the next generation.
I'm planning on getting new pc soon. I was planning on avoiding nvidia because i had read it might be more difficult to get drivers. Does this mean they are going to improve things in general or just for the newest and likely most expensive stuff? I dont want to buy the newest possible gpu since they always have bloated price for being new and a bit older ones are likely decent enough too.
Not Acer. I’ve been burnt by them too much in the past.