Debian 10 "Buster" Should Be Out Around Mid-2019, Debian 12 Is "Bookworm"

[schmidtbag]

1. Laptop with 32bit intel core duo cpu (one generation before 64bit core2 duo) which isn't that bad and it handles many tasks really well (I am actually trying to sell this one for about 50 euros).

I think you're going to have a hard time selling that. I have a hard time giving away functional Core2 Duo systems.

2. An old pc which I use without monitor for server tasks. Mostly for sharing my printer (which doesn't have network support on its own), remote torrents download and broadcasting media to my smart tv via minidlna, sharing files and a few other tasks. I have connected to it more than 5 IDE hard drives, so there are no cheap alternatives for this setup. Surely, in the future, with a small budget I could replace this with a big sata hard drive and a rhaspberry pi, but it still works fine so it's not quite worth it yet, in my opinion.

Just because something works fine, that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't worth replacing (and yes, the contrary is just as true). That being said, I think it's great you're making use of old hardware, but the 5+ HDDs alone would use more power than an entirely new system. I don't know how much electricity costs in your area, but I really think it'd be a worthy investment to replace that hardware with something more energy (and space) efficient. A Raspberry Pi 3, a single SATA drive that meets/exceeds the capacity of all your current drives, and a SATA to USB converter would surely cost less than $100 USD. Such a system should operate below 20W under full load. You could fit it all in a shoebox and leave it passively cooled.

3. My mothers desktop pc which has intel pentium D cpu. It is still quite capable of browsing internet and libreoffice tasks and I think it's still doing a better job than a rhaspberry pi.

Actually a RPi 3 would definitely perform better than the Pentium D, by a significant margin (1st gen RPi definitely wouldn't). However, I do believe you that the PD is sufficient for her needs.

4. Finally, a not so old netbook (I believe one of the last 32bit netbooks) in which my father currently has windows 7 and I'm trying to convince him to install some linux on it (Debian is the last remaining 32bit distro with good quality in my opinion).

Assuming that netbook uses an Atom, I'd say that's worth keeping. If it has a Celeron... I'd rather have the Pentium D.

[Vistaus]

Rolling is development model until release. Like tumbleweed never releases it's just a snapshot. I know what you mean, but technically it does not work that way for any operating system.

Doesn't work that way for any operating system? So Arch, Solus, etc. always do a proper stable release? I've never seen any release with those distributions labeled like that because 99% of the time their releases are just updated snapshots (i.e. less updates to install after a clean install) or a few minor tweaks (i.e. a different boot flag).

[PackRat]

Doesn't work that way for any operating system? So Arch, Solus, etc. always do a proper stable release? I've never seen any release with those distributions labeled like that because 99% of the time their releases are just updated snapshots (i.e. less updates to install after a clean install) or a few minor tweaks (i.e. a different boot flag).

I was referring to Windows , Macos and GNU/Linux as operating systems that have production releases . I said Tumbleweed (that is rolling) is just a is a snapshot. Third party developers do not target rolling development distro's and this is why Nvidia and Amd don't make drivers for Arch.

[DrYak]

2. An old pc which I use without monitor for server tasks. Mostly for sharing my printer (which doesn't have network support on its own), remote torrents download and broadcasting media to my smart tv via minidlna, sharing files and a few other tasks. I have connected to it more than 5 IDE hard drives, so there are no cheap alternatives for this setup. Surely, in the future, with a small budget I could replace this with a big sata hard drive and a rhaspberry pi, but it still works fine so it's not quite worth it yet, in my opinion.

Been there, done that.
- I'm using an old re-purposed Raspberry Pi 1 (B+, v1.2) because I really don't need more bandwidth for the file sharing part.
(You could pickup one of the newer Raspberry Pi 3+ with faster network for 35$)
- Using a second hand Samsung 830 128 GB mSATA drive I managed to get for less than 40EUR
(there are plenty of people upgrading old laptops on second hand markets like ebay. You can land a decently sized mSATA for cheap. You can use a checksumed filesystem like BTRFS if you're afraid about old-age flash wear and want to be able to detect it)
- Using X850 USB3-to-mSATA adapter, you find them cheap on ebay ( 20 EUR) , they even come with spacers and a USB-bridge-PCB to screw them directly onto your favourite single-board computer (and an extra 5v cable to tap into the 5v GPIO pin if your mSATA is power hungry) (and odroid have an updater for the JMicron's chip firmware to enable TRIM that runs directly on the ARM SBC).

For less than 100EUR one can get :
- something that will only use a tiny fraction of the power that your current server uses.
- a fun project to experiment with over the week-end.

Otherwise for a little bit more (125 USD) you could try to see when the next batch of Helios 4 is out - NAS oriented SBC with 4 SATA ports and high speed network. And still very low power.

3. My mothers desktop pc which has intel pentium D cpu. It is still quite capable of browsing internet and libreoffice tasks and I think it's still doing a better job than a rhaspberry pi.

I second schmitdbag : current Raspberry Pi 3+ would outperform this for a fraction of the power budget.
(But storage is going to be the limiting factor : SD card are rarely a stellar enough quality to be used as main desktop storage, your best bet is probably something-sata-over-USB, see my own example above).

[schmidtbag]

(But storage is going to be the limiting factor : SD card are rarely a stellar enough quality to be used as main desktop storage, your best bet is probably something-sata-over-USB, see my own example above).

Just a side note - if you get a UHS-1 class SD card, the performance is roughly as good as a typical 7200RPM mechanical HDD. Better seek times but sometimes slightly worse read/write speeds, so it evens out pretty well. I'm not sure if the Pi3 supports UHS-1 speeds, though.

[Vistaus]

Third party developers do not target rolling development distro's and this is why Nvidia and Amd don't make drivers for Arch.

But they also don't necessarily target stable distros. Corebird, for example, requires GTK 3.20 or higher and Ubuntu 16.04, despite being the current LTS, doesn't have 3.20 (it has 3.18). And the next version of Corebird (current git master, but due for release later this year) requires GTK 4. Sure, GTK 4 hasn't been released yet but it will be released later this year and so will the next big version of Corebird, so 18.04 LTS, Debian Stable and Red Hat aren't targeted.

[PackRat]

But they also don't necessarily target stable distros. Corebird, for example, requires GTK 3.20 or higher and Ubuntu 16.04, despite being the current LTS, doesn't have 3.20 (it has 3.18). And the next version of Corebird (current git master, but due for release later this year) requires GTK 4. Sure, GTK 4 hasn't been released yet but it will be released later this year and so will the next big version of Corebird, so 18.04 LTS, Debian Stable and Red Hat aren't targeted.

https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:42.3?pk_campaign=counter

"Leap 42.3 continues to use KDE’s Long-Term-Support release 5.8 as the default desktop selection while also offering GNOME 3.20, the same as used by SUSE Linux Enterprise"
Canonical missed the boat...

[DrYak]

Just a side note - if you get a UHS-1 class SD card, the performance is roughly as good as a typical 7200RPM mechanical HDD. Better seek times but sometimes slightly worse read/write speeds, so it evens out pretty well. I'm not sure if the Pi3 supports UHS-1 speeds, though.

Regarding speeds on RPi3 :
- there's the possibility to overclock and ask the MMC bus to operate at 100Mhz (normal speed at which higher-speed SD cards operate) instead of the MMC's normal 50Mhz speed.
Works on most cards (they should be supporting 100Mhz for their high speed anyway), and gives you better performance.

Regarding the performance :
I was more refering to the endurance. If you abuse SD cards a lot, some will die faster than other.
(Big name brands with ECC, with better wear leveling, etc. tend to survive better. F3 on linux is your friend to test the SD cards, and it is available from Raspbian's repo).

[kneekoo]

Well, I still have those machines:

1. Laptop with 32bit intel core duo cpu (one generation before 64bit core2 duo) which isn't that bad and it handles many tasks really well (I am actually trying to sell this one for about 50 euros).

Check your laptop model. With $13 I upgraded my Core 2 Duo CPU to a better and faster version (supported by the motherboard), with 64-bit capability and even virtualization support. And I replaced the HDD with an SSD and I love how that laptop works - I don't even want to buy a new laptop yet, that's how well it performs. So if you have good upgrade options, give it a thought. The 256GB SSD (Samsung 850 Pro) wasn't cheap, but it's way cheaper than a new laptop. Of course, I installed the parts myself and I remove the dust periodically, so my 9-year-old laptop feels great with the new parts.

2. An old pc which I use without monitor for server tasks. Mostly for sharing my printer (which doesn't have network support on its own), remote torrents download and broadcasting media to my smart tv via minidlna, sharing files and a few other tasks. I have connected to it more than 5 IDE hard drives, so there are no cheap alternatives for this setup. Surely, in the future, with a small budget I could replace this with a big sata hard drive and a rhaspberry pi, but it still works fine so it's not quite worth it yet, in my opinion.

It's definitely worth looking for a Raspberry Pi 3+, and here are some microSD Card Benchmarks done on different versions of Raspberry Pi. I use Samsung Evo+ 32GB on my Pis, and they are reasonably good. But you should definitely avoid doing intensive file-system tasks on the microSD card, because you would shorten its life with constant torrenting. The only bad thing is the Raspberry Pi PCs have USB 2.0, which doesn't support simultaneous read-write operations, so your torrenting would definitely be limited as a result, as long as your files are not completely downloaded. However, one external SATA drive connected over USB would successfully replace those old IDE drives, which are quite slow anyway. And although the Pi's major advantage in power draw compared to your "monstrous 5-disk setup" would not cover your acquisition costs in a short amount of time, it would certainly have a positive effect on the electrical monthly bill.

3. My mothers desktop pc which has intel pentium D cpu. It is still quite capable of browsing internet and libreoffice tasks and I think it's still doing a better job than a rhaspberry pi.

Years ago, I donated my old Pentium D PC to my mother, and it is arguably better than a Raspberry Pi, although the CPU only has one core. Of course a new CPU and a SSD would bring it to life, but I'm not eager to spend any money on a PC that old. And replacing it with a Raspberry Pi would require an HDMI-VGA converter to connect it to the existing monitor, so again I'm not exactly eager with this perspective. The good thing is she rarely uses it, so I'm off the hook.

4. Finally, a not so old netbook (I believe one of the last 32bit netbooks) in which my father currently has windows 7 and I'm trying to convince him to install some linux on it (Debian is the last remaining 32bit distro with good quality in my opinion).

I have one of these as well - a Dell Mini 10, with an dual-core Atom 32-bit CPU @1.6GHz and 1GB RAM, and with a little bit of research and tuning I got it to play 720p YouTube with Debian - not in the browser, but with mpv. Anyway, it's a very nice little netbook and even if it could run 64-bit software on it, the lack of an RAM upgrade option from 1GB of RAM is unappealing. 64-bit software needs more RAM, so even with zram activated I'd still use 32-bit software on it. And Debian 32-bit is a very good option.

[dungeon]

Third party developers do not target rolling development distro's and this is why Nvidia and Amd don't make drivers for Arch.

Third party developers should target users, of course if they want users

Of course distros who have everything rolling non stop in unpredictable directions can't be easely targeted, sometimes even by its user