> I understand where you are coming from, but wonder how many
> need such a system.  I just checked and Wal-Mart has
> brand new systems with 1 TB disk and 3GB ram for $300. 
> For a used system, I see a 1.7GHz P4 w/512 RAM for $25.
> 
> One problem with the PIIs is that they are being scrapped
> as junk.  You can't find a lot of them any more.
> 
> The other side is how many users will be satisfied with
> systems without Java, JavaScript, iframes, Flash, etc?
> 
> Personally, I don't have Flash on my regular browser
> because it is used 90% of the time for ads that I don't want
> to see.  I have another browser with it for those few
> occasions that it's needed.
> 
> I like the command line (konsole), but many don't. 
> I've been thinking of going back to Lynx/Links because of
> all the junk put out by a lot of web sites.
> 
> OTOH, Trinity is quite snappy on a Core2 system or even a
> 3GHz P4 (2005 vintage).

Perhaps are seeing things from a BLFS "geek" perspective. :)

I live in a rural area. Folks in such areas don't have Wal-Marts close by. Closest one to me is an hour away. As a caveat, none of my three immediate rural neighbors own a computer. Which means the average computers owned in this area is still greater than one per household because I have five. :)

There are many people in less developed regions of the world who have no easy access to computers and $300 is a year's salary.

For the sake of discussion let's raise the bar to a PIII. Yet doing so evades the point that NT4, a 32-bit OS from the 1990s, run circles around anything Linux based on the same hardware. Is there a way to tweak better performance out of TDE? I don't know.

How many users would be satisfied without Java, JavaScript, iframes, Flash, etc? Probably many. :) I use NoScript in Firefox to disable all of that. Konqueror has a way to create white lists for some of that, but I never found the interface easy to use.

A better question is how many people using older computers would be satisfied without that crap? Probably all because they aren't using that machine as a web surfing or video appliance. They would be using the machine as a basic office (or possibly school) system with nominal web browsing.

Darrell