Weird, Question? Would getting an older computer to use instead of my gaming computer help me program better?

Python Help
1

I mean I can’t fully realize that I am not doing art and writing fan fiction, but learning a skill…

Would it be a great idea if I got a used computer installed Psych Linux and FreeDos and used that to study Python and other Programing languages?

2

sure, for some people it helps to have dedicated hardware for specific tasks.

And you don’t need much processing power at all for most Python programs, and developing Python on Linux feels very natural.[1]

  1. I don’t know about Psych Linux or FreeDos specifically, but they’re probably fine. ↩︎

3

Maybe. If it helps, then go for it! You can use basically anything to learn on, and there’s a good argument that having a slower computer will teach you disciplines that otherwise you might get sloppy on, but other than that, take whatever is convenient.

I would recommend ensuring that you have a good quality keyboard, though. That doesn’t mean an expensive one - you can get a good keyboard for like ten bucks if you look in the right places - but make sure you’re comfortable spending many many hours on it.

4

I’ve done this several times. It is enormously freeing to know that you can completely trash the machine and start over, without it taking all your other work with it. In my case it’s a hand-me-down laptop from the rest of the family, but I also have an old office PC I picked up cheap, and of course a Raspberry Pi can do a lot (and connect you to physical electronics).

Putting Linux on whatever it is is a good idea. A knowledge of Unix-like operating systems is a marketable skill in its own right. (I found Linux Mint painless to install.) Security mechanisms can prevent some off-the-shelf PCs from loading Linux, so it’s a good thing to check before you buy. (See UEFI - Wikipedia, but don’t imagine you have to understand all that.)

I echo what @Rosuav said about a good keyboard (and mouse). I would have added “monitor”, but most modern monitors have several inputs and will switch to whichever is live.

5

You could also use microservices or virtualisation. In the case of virtualisation, you could change the architecture type, number of CPU cores…
Note that this is also true for microservices but to a lesser extent.