LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu.

This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrived, we were fucked. We had to go and build our own image with Gnome as the default and install that. It was really stupid, and I never saw our users have any easier a time with Unity than they did with Gnome. It was a gratuitous change for change's sake.

I think Microsoft's low-level HW engineering skills are underappreciated. Sure, IOS and Android rule the world, but the responsiveness of a Surface tablet kills them both on that one axis.

That said, IMO the problem is not so much that Unity exists, but that they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. To be fair, what Google and Apple do to mobile devices more than a year old or so is every bit as bad IMO so I can cut them some slack.

What this has achieved for me is a migration back to desktop machines from IPad and Android tablets. My 2013 IPad Air is now pretty much a brick with IOS 9 and my Nexus 7 from 2013 is unusable. Compare and contrast with my 2009 Core 2 Quad desktop that's still going strong.

Finally, consider the hideous electronic waste we generate by effectively forcing people to upgrade HW every year or two.

Agreed on the Unity stuff. I think Unity could be fine and dandy on its own, but it should NOT be the default UI for a system designed and distributed under the auspices of being the super inclusive Linux of the 3rd world. Which is kinda what Ubuntu was trying to be.

If you want to be inclusive and spread technology to those that don't have it and can't afford it, you HAVE to support very, very low grade hardware.

> they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines.

They actually did; they just ignored the feedback and insisted that Daddy Mark knows best, completely throwing away all of the reasons that Ubuntu is actually named Ubuntu (namely: they stopped listening to the community).

I was willing to forgive Unity, though (hell, I kinda liked it, at least on systems that could actually run it). It was the combination of repeated awesome-looking but inexplicably-stifled projects (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android) and the Amazon Lens that resulted in me swearing off the community in which I was once happy to be a part.

Indeed. Decent responsive GUIs have been available for decades, and it's one of the great failings of the industry that we can't keep them that way, either in open source or the commercial world.

Of course it works fine with XP, that was the target specs in 2001 when that OS was released. Maybe try a Linux distribution from 2001 and you'd have a fair comparison.

I remember how XP was received. It was slow as hell compared to Win98 and even to Windows 2000. And 256MB RAM is too little for XP, W2K would be probably fine.

I have successfully run XP on 96MB of RAM. It ran surprisingly okay on a fresh install. Multitasking, Firefox and everything. As it aged though it declined badly. XP never was very good at self-maintenance.

I have ironically had similar-to-worse results with running 2015 Android on 2011 hardware, which has 512MB of RAM. The cheek!

Unity needs graphic acceleration. Of course it does not work on something like that. Use Lubuntu and it will work just fine.

XP on such machine is not responsive. Maybe it could be usable, if you uninstall half of operating system, and replace most programs (IE with Opera 12.X....). Or better is to use Win2k.

No! Lightweight Linux distro, is your best bet to revive such junk today.

EDIT: fixed typo; I restored a few netbooks in EE, but whatever.

I've run relatively recent Linux distros on hardware with far tighter constraints (like on my Compaq Presario 1210; may you rest in peace, old friend). Damn Small Linux was king here, but distros like Tiny Core and Puppy are also designed for this exact use case.

256MB RAM is actually pretty generous for Windows XP, as is the Pentium III; neither were unheard of in "Made For Windows XP™" systems.

Also, XP was released in 2002, so it should work rather well on the previous year's hardware...

Wiki: General availability October 25, 2001; 15 years ago.

General minimum recommended for XP was/is 512MB.

Microsoft specified minimum is 64MB, recommended 128MB. XP RTM with 128MB RAM was perfectly usable, obviously it was not a good idea to run lots of crap in background.

Nice... Didn't Google before posting... Busted. :)

You're the hopeful kind I see. XP was utter shit on "medium" hardware of its time. It ate ram like no tomorrow compared to 98.