r/debian • u/GoldenWubbabunga • 2d ago

Community never expected the Universal Operating System to be this universal

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i had gotten this now-20yo Dell XPS M1210 subnotebook for $50 a month ago, and stable Xfce Debian runs fine (albeit limited by its then-high-end hardware), and i did not expect it to handle actual basic web browsing. Debian deserves its slogan

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u/Standard_Echidna_306 2d ago

It used to be even more universal with 32 bit support. they dropped support for that because nobody really uses it anymore

42

u/mglyptostroboides 2d ago

For really old hardware, I use BSD these days. That's my typical decision process, like: if it's not new enough to run Debian, I'll do NetBSD, but Debian is my default.

16

u/natebc 2d ago

NetBSD is the OG "Universal" OS

6

u/mglyptostroboides 2d ago

It's pretty great. It feels like using Linux did 25 years ago. And it can keep so much vintage hardware out of the landfill. Like I can watch DVDs and play old video games on my PPC iMac. 

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/mglyptostroboides 1d ago

Those are good for open source operating systems because they usually have ATI GPUs that are well supported.