2023-03-07

I put Haiku on an old laptop I thrifted. It's been fun, so far.

Putting it on a 4x3 screen feels appropriate. The aesthetics of this Dell actually feel even more dated than the laptop actually is (this could be a late 90's laptop apart from the two (2) USB ports it includes). This somehow suits Haiku very well, and Haiku runs well on it.

On one hand, I can't think of much that would be good to run on a Pentium M anymore -- it came with XP -- but actually I think I approach this from the other side: It would be a waste to install Haiku on a powerful modern machine. It feels like I am going with the grain -- it will use 512Mbytes of RAM happily, and that's what I've got. It's not like cramming modern Linux (plus a lot of swap).

Anyway, justification aside -- I have also left a spinning disk in there -- it seems silly to find an IDE SSD and put one in there. While I don't miss these slow things for real work, there's something interesting about having one in a machine again. I don't think I've had a machine with a spinning boot drive for 10 years.

Now I get an affordance: when I click on a link without a browser open, I hear the disk paging in the binary before the window appears a second or two later. It's like haptic feedback that the machine is doing something. I wasn't aware how much I miss this on modern machines when it seems that software just sticks for a bit and I am not sure if it registered my click, is spinning the CPU, waiting on the network or whatever.

Again: not recommending a renaissance of HDDs or anything, but it's interesting to see one aspect of what we lost with SSDs. Like how LED traffic lights don't get hot enough to melt snow -- sometimes the shortcomings of the old tech were a hidden advantage all along.