news
Linux couldn't save my old netbook, so I tried Haiku OS
Quoting: Linux couldn't save my old netbook, so I tried Haiku OS —
Desktop Linux can often be a great choice for revitalizing old hardware, but some hardware is still too old. Not even Debian with a lightweight desktop environment could make my 2009 netbook a usable computer, so I tried again with a completely different operating system: Haiku OS.
Haiku is a free and open-source continuation of BeOS, a desktop operating system developed in the 1990s. It's designed to be "a fast, efficient, simple to use, easy to learn, and yet very powerful system for computer users of all levels." This isn't a Linux distribution—even though it can run some software ported from Linux, and it borrows some hardware drivers from FreeBSD, it's not a Unix-like environment.
My last attempt with this netbook was installing Debian 12, the last version that supported 32-bit x86 processors, with the LXQt desktop environment. It was borderline usable for text editing, file management, and terminal applications, but performance was poor and web browsing was mostly unusable. Following that experiment, a few people suggested I try Haiku OS with its lower system requirements, and that sounded like a great idea.