It really depends on what you want to do. Word processing it can handle, scientific analysis it’ll be slow at, 3d modelling it’ll end up in power point mode quicker than newer machines. Coding would be fine, though compiling would take longer and testing may or may not be viable.
A reasonable desktop from that era should be about comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, which can certainly be useful. Power consumption is probably the main argument against it.
Enshittification, they code poorly on purpose so people need to upgrade their hardware for ever increasingly bloated software. Linux doesn’t play those games.
Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.
It didn’t have to be this way. I can run modern Linux on 20+ year old PCs.
If you actually tried to do anything useful on a 2004 machine, you wouldn’t post that.
It really depends on what you want to do. Word processing it can handle, scientific analysis it’ll be slow at, 3d modelling it’ll end up in power point mode quicker than newer machines. Coding would be fine, though compiling would take longer and testing may or may not be viable.
A reasonable desktop from that era should be about comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, which can certainly be useful. Power consumption is probably the main argument against it.
Enshittification, they code poorly on purpose so people need to upgrade their hardware for ever increasingly bloated software. Linux doesn’t play those games.
Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.