There has been an increasing trend in “cloud-based” software. Cloud-based or simply cloud software is a family of software that runs inside the web browser without need to install it, very similar to how a normal website would operate.
The difference is that in our days, we can have fully-fledged software running inside the browser such as IDEs, office suites, enterprise software and much more. Thanks to modern web technologies like WebAssembly.
The typical user of the Internet nowadays spends most of his/her time inside the web browser.
This is a very welcome change in some aspects, because it means that as users, we are not in urgent need to upgrade our hardware to these new fancy $1800 Macbooks.
Some example on cloud-based software could be:
OnlyOffice Cloud or Collabora Office (based on LibreOffice) for document editing. Some people of course use Google Suite for their work.
Nextcloud for hosting and sharing files (and more).
Replit or Eclipse Theia as a cloud-based IDE that can be used by developers.
HuggingFace or Google Colab for machine learning, and training models on high-performance GPUs remotely.
Meetings in the browser with Jitsi and BigBlueButton (We have written before on open source Zoom alternatives).
Premium AAA games thanks to stuff like NVIDIA GeForce Now, Amazon Luna and Xbox Cloud Gaming
Even classic games like Counter Strike 1.6 are available online.
Much more.
Some of these services are premium, while others can be self-hosted on your own VPS (free $200 credit with DO). However, aside from that, the only thing you need to run any of these cloud software is a web browser running inside an operating system.
This means that you can have an old laptop with an Intel i5 or AMD Ryzen +2500U CPU, while easily doing most of your work and entertainment activities with no issues. Any 5-7 years old laptop could be decent enough to do this.
I have an old Lenovo Thinkpad x260 laptop with i5 6th generation and 128 GB SSD, it can pretty much run most software mentioned inside the browser:
Perhaps the only thing that needs an upgrade in such laptops is the RAM; you don’t want your laptop to freeze because Chrome ate all the memory. Luckily, most laptops have extra slot for additional memory installation, and most laptop RAMs (16GB) won’t cost you $50 (just make sure your laptop supports them):
Hence, the idea is get an old laptop, upgrade its RAM, and then use it as a daily driver with any cloud-based service you want. Some of these services may be premium as we described; but their monthly price is negligible comparing to buying a fully-fledged laptop or desktop with dedicated GPU to do run your tasks locally.
You can buy some dirt-cheap used laptops on Amazon here:
Or browse the list of Renewed/Refurbished laptops:
Don’t let your OS get in the way, don’t install a bloatware like Windows on these poor old machines.
Instead, once you get any of these laptops, just install any of the Linux distributions suitable for old hardware that we recommend, and you will be ready to go.
Perhaps you also consider enabling ZRAM on your Linux distribution, because a lot of people report that it helped them with their low memory laptops and provided extra performance. Some distributions like Pop!_OS already have it turned on by default.
Additionally, you can find some useful tips on our website about increasing laptops battery life on Linux. A commentor says he was able to increase battery life on a 2015 Macbook (running Linux) from 2.5 hours to 4.5 hours following these tips!
Last Week Open Source News
We follow open source news from all over the Internet so you don’t have to.
System76 released a new laptop model of Pangolin; powered by AMD Ryzen 6800U and 32GB of RAM for $1300.
Transmission, the famous open source torrent program, released version 4.0 containing tons of updates and improvements. Perhaps the most noticeable one is that it now uses less CPU power and RAM by 50% and 70% respectively.
GNOME Software is getting better in terms of performance, newer releases in the future should display available apps for installation much faster than before.
Interesting Stuff from the Web
These discussions and articles might be interesting for you, all related to either Linux or open source software:
The team behind Thunderbird, the open source email client, wants to build it again from the ground up for many reasons.
There is now a new open source alternative to Zapier called ActivePieces. Licensed under the MIT license.
If you are interested in jobs related to open source software, then perhaps fossjobs.net could be helpful for you.
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Great stuff. I love this. My only issue is finding old laptops.
Essentially everyone I know uses their laptop until its junk i.e so old spec is very low and battery etc dead or worse.
New machines myself I buy Chromebooks and old machines when can find either use Linux or Chrome OS flex.
Old machines are also great for low spec old games or just basic Office work.
Really what are overpriced new machines for ? Websites that are badly designed? high end games that are overpriced and no different to the last version? The spec of machines becomes less important as time passes.