Those old machines run fine enough after initial browser loading once you install ghostery, ublock or noscript.

As for the engadget link, why not link straight the source:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc-mac/

Even better to have other hardware doing the ad plucking instead of making it run tons of rules against each site. Something like pfsense has plugins to do this, or run all the network traffic through privoxy on your home network, and it'll also block tons of in-app ads on all the mobile devices using wifi downstream of that.

one can also try dillo.. albeit it's gonna be less pleasant aesthetically, it's as light as it can be.

My main home computer is a 2 Go netbook with an Atom CPU. Not only I use it to browse the internet on a daily basis, but it was what I used to develop an award-winning, AI-powered content classification webapp.

I used to do it because I had no choice (alternatives are way too expensive than what I can afford).

A lot of Chromebooks are still shipping with 2GB of RAM and they do a perfectly sufficient job of running the "Internet" for most everyday users. I would argue your lower limit of a reasonable Internet browsing experience is higher than average because of your technical background. 512MB would be limiting for sure, but a machine with 2GB of RAM running a Linux desktop, especially with an SSD if possible, would make a fine everyday laptop.

*edit: Forgot to mention also that ad blocking aids tremendously in making the internet more usable on underpowered machines.

Even Win10 still has a 32-bit version in fact.

For £35 you can pick up a Windows 10 32-bit tablet with wifi, Bluetooth, HDMI out, USB OTG, 1GB RAM, a MicroSD slot, 32GB eMMC, Intel Atom CPU and a year of Office 365 personal. They're excellent value for money.

2 GB of RAM and a swap is capable of running even ubuntu x64 comfortably. Take away swap and browsing becomes a problem, I wouldn't suggest SSD because of that.

Just don't use an SSD from 2004 and you'll be fine

Well, I'd argue that Internet browsing with 2GB is only suitable for reading news and email. This then is a common denominator for layman user, who then wouldn't be using Linux or Pi to begin with. However, this thread is not about Chromebook (and I agree with you there about Chromebook - my wife uses it for email/youtube browsing, and it works perfectly fine).

There's a big difference between Chromebook and Linux/Pi/etc world of hardware/software experience for any person. You can throw a Chromebook to anyone and you wouldn't have to care about it. But try imagining the idea of giving Linux type OS to anyone...we know what happens next.

This is one reason why tablets (particularly starting with iPad) became popular among average crowd.

What happens next? I've given Ubuntu laptops (2010 laptops) to my dad, mom, girlfriend and sister, and they're liking it a lot, especially the fact that they don't have to worry about malware. They're fine with it, it's not like people are born with an innate understanding of the Windows UI and are incapable of learning anything else.

Curious, for the "Ubuntu for Grandma" box, do you use the default partition plan? Because I find that stock Ubuntu has the infuriating habit of filling the boot partition with linux kernels and then freaking out unhelpfully during later updates about the lack of space.

Run purge-old-kernels on an @reboot crontab: http://news.softpedia.com/news/here-s-how-to-remove-old-kern...

Tried Ubuntu for my great-grandpa. Having to redownload 100s of MB because of prebundled DE was stupid (was coming from SuSe/KDE). Also the upgrade story was not so good at that time, switched him to Debian and never looked back.

For my mom, I think I set one partition for everything. I doubt an email, web, and solitare machine is going to eat a 256GB SSD over a year or so.

I do, yes, although that is a problem I have even on my machines. I just periodically clean their kernels up...

One can watch youtube, play browser games and browse full web sites, and watch h.264 movies with a system that has under 1GB of ram.

And your second point is almost moot since Chromebooks run on top of Gentoo Linux of all things.

ChromeOS has vetted, high quality drivers and a tightly coupled window manager layer w/fewer layers of indirection.

Argue all you want, I do all my work and browsing in virtual machines and those usually just have between 1 and 2 Gb RAM and 1 CPU core. Works just great.

2-4GB is not enough for you? And the brand spanking new 2016 Macbook Pros default to 8GB and 2-4 is not enough on an old computer? I routinely browse the web in a 2GB Linux VM with Firefox under Windows, with less than 1GB in use on htop. It's easy to run even Ubuntu with under 200MB of RAM usage if you forgo Unity, and 500 MB with it.

What hobbles the web on older hardware is not "2-4GB" but very slow processors (having to handle all that advertising Javascript, over-animated UIs, and bloated front-end frameworks).

> What hobbles the web on older hardware is not "2-4GB" but very slow processors (having to handle all that advertising Javascript, over-animated UIs, and bloated front-end frameworks).

^ This, as someone else said in this thread - javascript is the new Flash of the web. At least in the Flash days, many web designers were descent enough to include html only versions. When I'm using my old laptop with js turned off many pages become unaccessible and web makers don't even realize that so many people in the World can't afford buying new computers.

512MB is certainly not going to be sufficient for huge web apps and the like, but is plenty for "real oldschool-style web pages" containing mostly text and images.

As I write this my system is consuming 440MB of 4GB, and I have many other (mainly source code) files open which I'm also working on.

Sadly, JavaScript is the new Flash/Java when it comes to resources.

512mb - 1024mb of ram is standard in a ton of cheap Android phones and tablets, developers that are mindful of poor connectivity and hardware can still create performant experiences.

512MB on Android is unusable. They have not released such devices in years(maybe no name Chinese brands are still releasing them). Mobile platforms are also extremely honed in to the mobile ecosystem, which cannot be said for desktop OSes.

My main computer is a Macbook Air from 2013 with 4 GB RAM, it can browse the web just fine.

How many people buy Pi to browse the web? The purpose of the project seems to be

1) Find something to do with a Pi

2) Instead of buying a Pi, run Pi infrastructure software on an old laptop instead

If browsing doesn't work on an old laptop (although it does, but for the sake of argument...) then the bug is observed after step #2 but the actual failure location was in step #1, when "I wanna browse the web" somehow led to using a Pi to do it.

Old laptops and pis arent exactly interchangable. There are som significant power, input/output, and form factor differences.