2026-09-13 23:17 UTC
@nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe At the risk of showing my youth and naivete, Packard Bell is a name I've only heard of but never experienced. The Wikipedia page tells me they were in the same boat as eMachines and Gateway in the early 21st Century, so I imagine they were particularly low-quality consumer machines?
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@nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-09-13 23:36
@litchralee_v6@ipv6.social Gateway was leeps and bounds better than the others. E-Machines and PB were about the same. EM's had shittier/lower spec hardware, but were far more standards compliant. You could usually get Linux running on an E-Machine. The Win Modem wasn't going to work, but the rest probably would. Packard Bell's often had terrible shit like a combo modem + sound card on a single ISA board. The hardware was almost always crazy proprietary like that. There were Packard Bell's that couldn't run NetBSD. But used Gateways made fine home servers, and were even decent desktops when new. Especially once the Pentium 2 became the standard, their quality actually increased a lot.