Solved! Coding on a very very old laptop

[LilWitch]

Hi, I'm new here. I just received a very old laptop as a gift and I was wondering if it could be used for coding. I'm actually trying to learn Python and go from there. Thing is, the laptop is a very old 500Mhz Pentium 3 with only 128mb of ram atm (up to 192mb officially, it uses an intel 440mx chipset and that got me thinking it could sustain up to 256mb of ram). I just got it and I'm trying to install Q4OS and WinXP on it.
I've seen many options like Pycharm, Atom, Wing, Eclipse, Brackets... but those look a bit too ram intensive for this machine. Perhaps old versions of those could work fine but at what cost? I've been using PyCharm on my main pc just fine but I feel like thats not an option in this case.
Why am I doing this then? Because I think it would be cool
What kind of coding? Light stuff, I'm learning atm

(This is going to be my first linux too btw)
Not sure if this is the place to ask this, sorry if it's not.
Thanks in advance

 

[USAFRet]

Because I think it would be cool

Cool?
If you consider watching paint dry to be 'cool'.

Your restriction will mainly be to get your dev software running.
Your secondary restriction will be to actually develop things applicable in 2021. Browsers and security policies have changed a lot in the last 20+ years.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you can use it for what you want, depends on the software you use, if it can run on that computer then yes. If not or it's too slow for you then no.
With that CPU and that little RAM it is a very limited system as to what it can run, you can find laptops for about $100 that will be many times faster and actually usable.

 

[USAFRet]

Because I think it would be cool

Cool?
If you consider watching paint dry to be 'cool'.

Your restriction will mainly be to get your dev software running.
Your secondary restriction will be to actually develop things applicable in 2021. Browsers and security policies have changed a lot in the last 20+ years.

 

[LilWitch]

Well I'm just trying to use what I have. Yeah it is not much but I thought it could be used for some light coding or something. Again, it was gifted to me and because of that I want to use it for something. I know the specs are not great, not even ok but I dont want to toss it away. I know I can use for some retrogaming but that's not what I want to do with it.
Is it really a bad thing that Im trying to use this laptop for coding? It surely is not ideal but is it really impossible?

 

[hang-the-9]

Well I'm just trying to use what I have. Yeah it is not much but I thought it could be used for some light coding or something. Again, it was gifted to me and because of that I want to use it for something. I know the specs are not great, not even ok but I dont want to toss it away. I know I can use for some retrogaming but that's not what I want to do with it.
Is it really a bad thing that Im trying to use this laptop for coding? It surely is not ideal but is it really impossible?

Very few things are impossible, for example you can eat a whole 5lb bag of rice one grain at a time, but would you want to spend the time and effort?

You have the laptop, you can get the programs you want to use, try them out. Then you will know if you can use it.

 

[USAFRet]

It surely is not ideal but is it really impossible?

Try it.

If it works, great.
If it does not, you'll have lost nothing but time.