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What are some good uses for an old laptop? (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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hello im back again...

so i recently upgraded a 11 year old laptop i use to use from 2gb of ram to 8, it made a big diffrent. also thanks to the linux community i decided on linux mint mate and its a pretty basic laptop.

i was going to use the laptop to make gaming videos with but it cant really game too well or record while gaming. it has another issue that is the battery is bad so it it to be plugged into a wall at all times, i guess its not very portable.

I litterly have no idea what to do now with it and i dont want to sell it sense i just upgraded the ram, like woudl it be better to try somethign else, any ideas by chance or things to share?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Check out the 'selfhosting' communities.

Retro gaming is an another option, Arcade Punks have a lot for resources for this. I don't retro game that often and storage speed is not an issue when I do so I have a few old drives with gaming systems on them I can just connect via usb & boot into when I'm in the mood.

On YouTube Network Chuck, Jeff Geerling and Explaining Computers have a lot of easy to access tutorials on setting up server stuff but most of it you can just copy & paste from tutorial sites or github.

Connect a few TB's of storage via usb, hdd dock is great but use whatever you can get. You could even run the OS from a USB stick and use the internal drive just for media storage, I done this for years with a 2008 pc server running Alpine Linux......as you have loads of ram you could even run the entire OS in ram from usb for an even faster system than ssd will provide with Alpine's diskless or disk data options.

Tailscale was a big one for me. Makes it simple to install on my server, laptop, desktop & phone so they can all talk to each other when out and about instead of worrying too much about firewalls and open ports at home....I am looking into this for hosting my own Lemmy instance at the moment.

If you have a personal music collection Navidrome + Symfonium, or other client, is amazing imo. Spotify killer. I also have slskd docker daemon running for soulseek so I can download flac music to my server when out and about and instantly stream it as mp3/ogg to my android device or laptop. Jellyfin and a torrent deamon does a similar job for video. As other have mentioned Pihole is cool and stuff like NextCloud too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

thanks for all this info!