Some initial thoughts on running Red Hat 7 workstation on an old laptop
I’m a user of an older piece of hardware. The computer is precious to me as it’s old enough to not have any support for the wifi card — thus I purchased a USB doggle — and it can only run “lightweight” operating systems. However, as I dive into opinion pieces about what it means for to be a lightweight operating system, I begin to doubt that there really is such a thing.
As an LXDE user, primarily for the functionality and perceived functionality, I decided that I should try using a different operating system on my older laptop. It has 2GB, so I thought perhaps it could handle Fedora. The CPU is AMD and ancient. We’re talking about dual core 2008 ancient. So I don’t expect much from any operating system.
Here are my findings.
1. Fedora runs slowly on my computer, very slowly. And I cannot use it.
2. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has similar issues with usability.
3. Red Hat 7 works, well, surprisingly, on Gnome desktop environment.
With this success, I thought seriously about the price tag. We’re looking at something near $49.00 for an annual no-support contract. Instead of simply buying Red Hat operating system 7, I have to buy a subscription. This fits the FOSS programming as a service model, but it’s something that I can’t afford right now. And so I put the idea down.
However, there may be reasons I would go back and purchase Red Hat.
1. While operating the system, it picked up my wifi card without needing to install it manually.
2. My graphics card just works, without needing to add non-free software manually.
3. I respect Red Hat’s security approach reputation.
The experience was so good, that I am considering writing Red Hat as my recommended operating system for small companies in a new project I’m working on. For now, I will keep Red Hat on the radar. Debian still remains my favorite OS to hack… because there’s a lot of hacking required to make it work.
