this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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Running something meaningful on a $20 hardware is a pleasure like no other
Its a nice flex to be more productive on a potato than some are on the fancy stuff
Recently got OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installed on an old 32-bit Eee PC.
The thing was an absolute ultra-budget potato 14 years ago when it was released, and yet, it still works just fine if all you need is editing some documents in LibreOffice. And, it lasts 6 hours on a single charge! (Originally 10-12 hours)
Conceptually I really like the old netbooks.
I've gotten into self hosting and like the idea of using a netbook as a thin client.
I'm kinda sad that netbooks mostly died off as a device class. I'd love to explore newer options.
Self-hosting is cool! But having played around with it myself, I just found thin clients to be not so useful in a single-user environment. At most, it could be useful if you want high battery life and the ability to run something heavy from time to time. But being tied to a high quality network connection even for something that could be 100% local gets annoying very quickly.
Still, as a printing machine + occasionally connecting to the server for something more, it does deliver.