About to move out from my parents and found the old Remix mini lying around collecting dust. Thought it might be possible to use it as a backup PC for light web surfing and YouTube when I’m back at home. Is that concept possible in 2023? If it is, what should I be prepared for and what to expect?
As long as you don’t install random apps and find an up to date browser: it’ll work just fine. Yeah, vulnerabilities are an issue, but only if they can get remote code execution in the first place, and it’s not like the majority of Android phones receives their monthly patches in time. Various vendors with “up to date” operating systems ship patches four times per year and even then you’re missing patches for things like GPU drivers that the upstream manufacturer dropped.
Realistically, to get hacked you need to get bad content into an app with a vulnerability or to install a bad app. Both are risks whether you’re using Android 13 or Android 5. The most important thing is to use official, up-to-date apps.
Firefox should run fine on Android 5, so your browser will be plenty secure. Don’t use Chrome or anything that uses WebViews, those only get updated on Android 7+. The official Youtube app is Android 8+, so you may need to use Firefox to watch Youtube content.
Expect browsing to be slow. A quad core A53 isn’t very usable by today’s standards. The storage is also quite lacking.
However, your device doesn’t fall victim to the worst exploits. It’s not a phone, so the risk of passive Bluetooth and WiFi exploits are much lower. It’s only got 16GB of storage, so you can’t really install that many apps on it, let alone install malicious ones.