like not doing anything, just a spare laptop in case i ever need one, what if i use it years after i installed debian on it?? i would have to update like 300 packages and would take a lot??
like not doing anything, just a spare laptop in case i ever need one, what if i use it years after i installed debian on it?? i would have to update like 300 packages and would take a lot??
It depends what packages you need, and what they have to interact with.
If it’s all standalone then no problem until the hardware degrades.
For example I had laptop (DOS/Win98 ) with a pcmcia network adapter with BNC 50 ohm coax network dongle, 9/25 pin serial/parallell ports, maybe p/s2 port, floppy drive and so on.
I can’t think what I’d connect that to I might have a parallell port on my PC, but on that laptop I think I only had laplink so I’d need a linux app to interact with that. I do still hve a floppy drive somewhere, but how to connect that to my motherboard?
So I’d probably be limited to keyboard and trackball input, and audio + (monochrome) video output.
lemmings on black and white, blurry, slow refresh rate would still “work” unless the hdd got corrupted.
Within a lifetime current gen wifi, usb, ethernet etc may all be as rare as 9 pin serial is today - it’s still around of course, but you cant rely on it.