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What's the best way to make use of an old laptop? (hexbear.net)

submitted 8 months ago by MaoTheLawn@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My aunt's got an old slightly broken laptop. She's got a new one. No one has any need for this old one anymore. It has no selling value. Etc etc etc.

I know I can put an SSD in it and run it on Linux to make it run smoothly as a laptop for emails and word processing etc, but I already have a crap old laptop for exactly that.

What sort of fun things can you do with an old laptop? I'm talking like, using it as a whole new device. Maybe using it as a 'TV Box' of sorts - getting some radio apps, and hacked streaming apps... Or loading up a bunch of PS2 games on it... or having it as the jankiest personal assistant, with timers, and calendars, and all that.

You know what I mean.

I love pointless gadgetry.

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[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Expanding upon other users' suggestions of running self-hosted services...

If you have multiple unused devices laying around, I'd suggest making a Kubernetes cluster out of them. (The easiest way to bootstrap a cluster would probably be using k3s.)

The main benefits of doing this are:

Your self-hosted services can scale to meet demand by running them on multiple nodes or more powerful nodes, letting you make the most of multiple crappy machines instead of being limited to its specs.
You can combine storage devices from across all your machines and create distributed volumes or large shared volumes.
If a machine goes down, your workloads can switch to another node to run on, preventing downtime.
You can add new machines as nodes and they'll be available to run your services without much additional effort.

It's a fair amount of effort to setup, but the benefits are worth it IMO.

[+] xj9@hexbear.net 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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[–] machinya@hexbear.net 2 points 8 months ago

kubernetes is the way to go for home cluster computing

i will challenge this idea every time I see it. The benefits that you get with it are good but usually quite overkill for the needs of a home cluster. Services that balances across nodes, no downtime, software defined storage; all of those stuff is nice and fun but most of the home clusters don't really need them.

kubernetes is quite complex and it's very hard to handle when you don't have all the necesary knowledge and experience to do so. it's very easy to misconfigure things and errors are often very hard to find when you don't know where to look. there are other projects that try to have a simpler version of the "cluster orchestration" (nomad, swarm, portainer and others. haven't tried all of them so I might be wrong) but they are also complex on it's own way and have their own share of problems.

my recomendation is that, unles you are planning to work on it and want to get more experience, you should start with smaller things (podman + systemd, regular docker, maybe start managing systems with ansible) and slowly build new things over what you already have. this has the benefit of letting you learn the basics slowly so that if you ever jump to the kubernetes bandwagon you will have more knowledge that will help the experience to be better

[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 1 points 8 months ago

Kubernetes is a huge time sink if you don't use a k8s distribution. But I set mine up long ago, so I have had the leg work done for awhile now. Mostly just reaping the benefits now.