I have an old ThinkPad SL-400 with a Core 2 Duo processor and 4 gigabytes of RAM.

I used to think it was completely useless and it ended up gathering dust for years.

But recently, my sister started learning to code, and I decided to give her this laptop.

So I installed Debian 12 with the KDE desktop, and to my surprise it handles things surprisingly well. I didn’t even feel the need to install something lighter like LXDE or XFCE.

It’s amazing how well it multitasks with only 4 gigabytes of RAM. Just to test its limits, I opened vscode, multiple tabs in Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox all at once (including a YouTube video). I even opened Shotcut and edited a video while the browsers were running. Sure, it’s not the fastest system I’ve ever seen, but it seems impossible to make it hang or freeze.

I’m using the Xanmod kernel and zswap, which might be helping to squeeze out more performance from this machine.

Overall it’s amazing that to see how linux can breathe life into older hardware. I hope more people knew this and could save mony while using the latest software.