Y'all laugh but I'm getting into Linux and dusted off an old i7 laptop with 16gb of RAM. Slapped a $40 512GB ssd and linux mint on it to get into [email protected]!
It could be as old as 15 years... If someone bought a species out i7 laptop in 2009 they may have upgraded it to 16gb at some point. Seems realistic enough
I have an Asus ROG laptop I bought in 2013 with a 3rd gen i7, whatever the gtx 660 mobile chip was and 16gb of ram, it's definitely old by any definition, but swapping for an ssd makes it super useable, it's the machine that lives in my garage as a shop/lab computer. To be fair, its job is web browsing, CAD touchups, slicing and PDF viewing most of the time, but I bet I could be more demanding on it.
I had been running mint w/ cinnamon on it before as I was concerned about resource usage, was a klipper and octoprint host to printer for a year and a bit. Wiped it and went for Debian with xfce becauae again, was originally concerned about resource usage but ended up swapping to KDE and I don't notice any difference so it's staying that way.
I really hate waste so I appreciate just how useable older hardware can be, Yeah there's probably an era that's less true but I'll go out on a limb (based on feeling only) and suggest that anything in the last 15 years this'll be true for, but that's going to depend on what you're trying to do with it, you won't have all the capability of more modern hardware but frankly a lot of use cases probably don't need that anyhow (web browsing, word processing, programming, music playback for sure, probably some video playback, pretty much haven't hit a wall yet with my laptop)
I have a ten-year old MacBook Pro with an i7 and 16gb of ram. Just because this thing was a total beast when it was new does not mean it isn't old now. works great with Ubuntu though. It's still not a good idea to run it as a server though. My raspberry pi consumes a lot less energy for some basic web hosting tasks. I only use the old MBP to run memory intense docker containers like openrouteservice and I guess just using some hosting service for that would not be much more expensive.
My i7 Thinkpad is a dual core and pretty trash. Can't even play YouTube videos without forcing H264 and even then it's better to use FreeTube. Sounds about on par with a Raspberry Pi
"Old laptop" has a Core 2 Duo and 4GB of DDR2 RAM.
It also has a better keyboard with plenty of travel, on-the-go replaceable battery, easily accessible components likely to get replaced/upgraded/cleaned, large cooler, large selection of I/O, has higher likelihood to survive 2 more years than a brand new laptop and it can be used as a weapon or anchor.
My current laptop is an i7 with 16 GB of RAM. Hardware requirements have plateaued pretty hard unless your trying to run something that requires the latest GPU.
Know what? Fine. I'll try Linux again. Tired of watching my craptop sit at 100% disk usage for 10 minutes before it starts responding. Mint is good to start with, ye?
If your craptop is using an HDD instead of an SSD, replacing it with an SSD would be a cheap upgrade you could do that would make a massive improvement.
Linux Mint cinnamon is gold standard for quality IMO. All my modern systems that can comfortably run it do.
That said it also uses more resources than your old craptop may like depending on just how old we are talking about.
If cinammon is a little slow, try mint xfce. Its a lot lighter on system resources. Last time i tried xfce it was a great performance compromise if a little unpolished in places.
If Mint xfce is also too slow you can give MX Linux a whirl. Its way faster and more minimal that mint out of the box. Yet it feels modern and allows you to install all the same programs as mint from the default software repo including flatpaks. MX fluxbox is probably as minimal as you would want to get. Try their flagship xfce first.
If you are trying to beat new life into a 25 year old dying dinosaur Puppy Linux will do it, but you won't enjoy using it.
It's mainly for movies and occasionally gaming on the go, and also my DDR machine. It's got a 1050 so it's... Not great, but it's had hard drive struggles most of its life and I've tried everything up to reinstalling windows.
I agree, mint is a good place to start.
If it turns out to be too much for your pc you could always try antix or q4os or puppy linux next, which is even more lightweight.
But I have recently found that mint is like a better version of ubuntu and I used to recommend ubuntu all the time because 9/10 times it just works.
tinyllama 1.1b would probably run reasonably fast. Dumb as a rock for sure. But hey its a start!
My 2015 t460 thinkpad laptop with an i7 6600U 2.6GhZ duo core was able to do llama 3.1 8B at 1.2T-1.7T/s which while definitely slow at about a word per second. Still, was also just fast enough to have fun in real time with conversation.
Than what are the minimal specs to run ollama (llama3 8b or preferably 27b) at a decent speed?
I have an old pc that now runs my plex and arr suite. Was thinking of upgrading it a bit and running ollama on it as well. It doesn't have a gpu, so what else does it need? I don't have a big budget, so no new nvidia card for me.
"decent speed" depends on your subjective opinion and what you want it to do. I think its fair to say if it can generate text around your slowest tolerable reading speed thats a bare minimum for real time conversational things. If you want a task done and don't mind stepping away to get a coffee it can be much slower.
I was pleasantly suprised to get anything at all working on an old laptop. When thinking of AI my mind imagines super computers and thousand dollar rigs and data centers. I don't think mobile computers like my thinkpad. But sure enough the technology is there and your old POS can adopt a powerful new tool if you have realistic expectations on matching model capacity with specs.
Tiny llama will work on a smartphone but its dumb. llama3.1 8B is very good and will work on modest hardware but you may have to be patient with it if especially if your laptop wasn't top of the line when it was made 10 years ago. Then theres all the models in between.
The i7 6600U duo core 2.6ghz CPU in my laptop trying to run 8B was jusst barely enough to be passing grade for real time talking needs at 1.2-1.7 T/s it could say a short word or half of a complex one per second. When it needed to process something or recalculate context it took a hot minute or two.
That got kind of annoying if you were getting into what its saying. Bumping the PC up to a AMD ryzen 5 2600 6 core CPU was a night and day difference. It spits out a sentence very quick faster than my average reading speed at 5-6 t/s. Im still working on getting the 4GB RX 580 GPU used for offloading so those numbers are just with the CPU bump. RAM also matters DDR6 will beat DDR4 speed wise.
Heres a tip, most software has the models default context size set at 512, 2048, or 4092. Part of what makes llama 3.1 so special is that it was trained with 128k context so bump that up to 131072 in the settings so it isnt recalculating context every few minutes..
For me, the worst part of setting up some new distro or service is when it's done and everything works. Then it just... Sits there. Working. Usually at some task I don't need very often. Very anticlimactic and boring. Then I have to find some other new thing to try, which is why my HTPC has been through like 4 distros in the past year.
It streams video through your LAN network so its equivalent client can play it. The name VLC comes from Video Lan Client which was the app's original purpose.
They were there from the beginning,
check the template it's been untouched since first upload. The only edit I made to the image since was better cropping. I intended for those white strips to be coke lines. Its a small detail but if you zoom in you can see some extra white on the nose lol. Why I added it to the character. Definitely smoking a joint still with that bud
I installed Debian 12 on my 14yo Pentium E5400 PC with 4GB RAM. I have installed on it: Pi-Hole, Jellyfin, Deluge, Grocy, Heimdall, HortusFox, Inventree, Portainer, Radicale, Speedtest Tracker, Trilium, WatchYourLan. Also have various samba shares. In the last year I have learnt a lot of server/Docker stuff, my server is not connected to Internet though. It's been fun.
I have had luck watching some HD videos through Jellyfin but others totally spike processor load avg. to 20 when normal values is 0.2, lol.
For example one of the most heavy computations are the facial recognition on Immich when new photos are uploaded, load avg. goes to 5-8, the 2 cores @100% for "few" minutes then idle again.
May I ask what PC this is? You might be able to flash Libreboot to it and keep the firmware updated/remove Intel Management Engine entirely. Internal flashing is possible on most of these older computers, no special flashing equipment needed, just need to type a few commands in terminal basically.
I just put GNU/Linux on a Celeron II 4 core single threaded CPU. It's running along fine. I didn't even have a use case, but just felt bad to let the old technology go to waste. This was within the last two weeks.
For the sake of "saving" your post (even as someone who has no idea how nextcloud works)... I made a quick search regarding nextcloud and the nextcloud docs says it needs a minimum of 128MiB ram per process while they recommend 512MiB which doesn't seem that much of a resource beast at all...? It COULD work, but not as good as your typical nextcloud setup with over 10 processes or something of the sort. Probably a headless/bare metal setup with dietpi, I guess?
Then again, as I said previously... this is a totally ignorant take on saving your post, but eh... who on earth would want to run nextcloud with less than 10 processes anyways? So I'm gonna go with "Yeah it does, but you'll (eventually) want to switch to a better sbc later on."
My 3rd gen i3 laptop has: dead battery, broken screen(about 1/3 of the screen is dead), loose USB ports that work when they feel like it and a decrepit HDD that was slow even when it was new. I have it for emergencies, but I don't think it's worth rebuilding it.
Well understood tech and still damn good math!
To think, just because the newest stuff is shinny! Total junk really just for ads and video games full if unknown complications and adverse effects. All a 'furbish needs to be back in top is a good Linux soul!