876
Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.
Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Idk what year that pic was taken, but 2GB of ram is useless no matter what operating system you put on it.
Except ofc for a home nas, but as a desktop, the user is going to open Firefox, try to open a website, it will take minutes to load and the user just wasted $20
Ubuntu 16.04
This is an old photo
MS-DOS
It's a poor spec for a phone, let alone a PC.
Sometimes it's best just to scrap it.
More importantly the GPU is going to be unable to process modern graphics which means it will fall to the CPU. The desktop will be very slow and potentially unstable.
Libre Office 5.2 seems to have been released in August 2016.
And a reverse image search shows the picture of at least as old as 2017
Edit: still not enough ram. 4gb, maybe, at a minimum, for this type of thing. Even Linux has it's limits if you're trying to get anything done in reasonable time on the modern web
Not sure how 2016 era gnome handled low ram, but I can assure you I was browsing the web just fine on an Ubuntu based lxqt machine around that time
5 minutes ago I was gaming on my 2gb Windows XP machine.
I just installed my tenth distro on a 2gb netbook, and they all played games of that era just as well as I remember. Just got done playing a map on dawn of war.
I don't expect these things to play cyberpunk 2077, but if you just want to play stardew valley or terraria it is more than sufficient.
After reading that, I just checked my memory. After an hour and a half using FF and and a videoplayer (on a reasonably up-to-date Ubuntu 20.x-based XFCE system), I'm using 2.2GB (out of 16, fairly typical, with no swap). So I'm pretty sure that - depending as always on what software they've chosen - 2GB is far from 'useless'. As always, depends on the use case. That's plenty if you spend most days in a text editor coding.
My NAS had 4GB and eventually I maxed it out to 16GB when the pricing for its type of RAM dropped significantly.
Mine has 256Mb for steaming audio. Doesn't use it all even :)
I mean, installing alpine is surprisingly simple and is capable of playing HD youtube by modern standards
Important note: alpine is black magic and the comparison I'm making is not really sensical if we take into account that one needs at least some terminal knowledge for alpine, let alone install doas instead of sudo (which is bloaty, as it turns out (for alpine stabdards at least))
Plenty of mem for Xv6