The old safari is slow and, can you believe it, HN does not fully function!
Now, we all know the hardware is premium and this device would probably run linux very smoothly and the touch interface would be a dream. But we can only dream right?
Safari is not known for being slow.
That machine is _old_. The iPad was released in 2010 - 13 years ago. And even when new it was substantially slower than contemporary PCs or Macs - Apple then was not the CPU powerhouse it is today. It has 256Mb RAM and early (so, slow) NAND flash storage.
I really think you would (or, at least, most people would) be very disappointed at how well it would run Linux now. Things like web browsing and running recent applications, and more ‘HN’ things like coding, would be very sluggish.
So now I’m going to put an open source operating system on my first gen 256MB RAM iPad to run a web server and that’s the same functionality I had in 2010 when I was using it to browse the then modern web?
You could arrange it like that, sure. Webkit ships Linux builds, there are DEs that will give you a miserable but usable experience on those specs. If you really want to condemn yourself to a fate Apple doesn't support, there's no technical reason you couldn't.
Replacing the same functionality was never an inherent part of the deal though. There will never be Find My Linux or the Linux Store. The overall idea is that we put older hardware to use instead of recycling it for marginal returns on scrap. It's why they put "Reuse" before "Recycle" in the EPA maxim.
So your alternative to mean old Apple not allowing you to run Linux is to have a shitty experience running Linux on hardware that wouldn’t meet the needs of a modern consumer ?
Maybe. Apple doesn't let you put third-party OSes on iPhones or iPads, it's unclear what would happen if they did.
It would probably start with something niche like a barebones Linux port, but then it might turn into an Asahi-style project that does give the user a perfectly normal user experience. Maybe people start shipping CalyxOS-style hardened iOS distributions for people who want to further neuter Apple's control over their system. Or maybe people reverse-engineer a Vulkan driver onto the hardware and use iPads as low-power ASICs. The sky is really the limit, here.
> But the devices were dreadfully slow and RAM constrained by todays standards.
Yeh. That's why people turn them into DNLA servers or FTP heads or motion sensors or security cameras or weather machines, spotifyd servers, Docker playgrounds, RC cars, GPIO controllers, home assistants, esoteric K8s nodes, et. al.. There's plenty of things you can do with hardware you don't intend to directly interact with, things that the iPhone is perfectly suited to do.
> Which modern browser engine do you real think would work decently on such a device?
Webkit? You can still build it for 32-bit arches, I don't really see what the holdup is. Firefox could squeeze into ~100mb of memory if you're light on tabs, and Chrome would... well, run. With a little help from swap space.
> Besides that, no pre- 2012 iOS devices supported 4G and the carriers are dropping 3G support completely in the US by the end of the year.
That's fine. If you want to use iOS, use iOS. Running the entire iOS userland would be a complete waste of CPU cycles if you wanted to just use it as a homelab.
> Webkit? You can still build it for 32-bit arches, I don't really see what the holdup is. Firefox could squeeze into ~100mb of memory if you're light on tabs, and Chrome would... well, run. With a little help from swap space.
If you tried to use swap on any older iOS device the storage would rapidly fail. Those devices had storage that was never designed for swap.
These are the minimum system requirements for running Firefox on Linux.
Apple hasn’t updated or supported WebKit for 32 bit processors for years and from what I can tell neither does Chromium or Firefox
How well do you think a 256MB RAM, 500Mhz processor will run Firefox and be able to access todays web?
The first iPhone introduce in 2007 had the performance of a 1997 iMac. By 2010, you weren’t even up to the speed of 1Ghz processor that came out in 2001. iOS devices didn’t reach anywhere near turn of the century PC performance until 2012 with the 1Ghz dual core iPhone 5.
That would also make a horrible DLNA server and god forbid you needed any transcoding. My old 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo from 2010 could barely handle Plex by 2017 with any moderately complex videos.
You can buy a $50 cheap Android phone today that would run rings around it or a $100 Raspberry PI or Windows stick.
Yes it is slow on older hardware. It was slow even back then. You must have forgotten the time it took to paint the rest of the page if you scrolled or zoomed out a liiittle too fast.
Sure this was due to the minuscole amount of RAM Apple ships their product with, but “Safari is slow” is appropriate.
Also “Safari is slow” on my i9 as well, I just need to open a GitHub PR with 10+ files to see it come to a crawl, whereas Chrome never feels it. But hey, its scrolling is buttery smooth even if clicking doesn’t work.
Safari is not known for being slow.
That machine is _old_. The iPad was released in 2010 - 13 years ago. And even when new it was substantially slower than contemporary PCs or Macs - Apple then was not the CPU powerhouse it is today. It has 256Mb RAM and early (so, slow) NAND flash storage.
I really think you would (or, at least, most people would) be very disappointed at how well it would run Linux now. Things like web browsing and running recent applications, and more ‘HN’ things like coding, would be very sluggish.