This laptop was originally sold with Windows 7 32-bit edition installed. Even back then it was really unresponsive and clunky. After several years of it lying around and being useless, I decided to do a really lightweight debian install on it.

And guess what? It can do so much more than sit idly in some landfill.

Now I can use it to write my study notes in neovim (gives me a good excuse to learn vim, and I’m learning slowly), listen to music with gst123, learn c and c++, torrent large files with transmission-cli and qbittorrent, and the list goes on…

I mostly just use tty. I hit “startx i3” if I absolutely need a GUI, but for everything else, tty. I use links2 for Wikipedia, online resources and browsing memes which is already a big chunk of my internet usage. I was really giddy when I saw Tor browser had a 32-bit version, it runs surprisingly well even with less than 1 gigabyte of memory (unless I visit some really bloated sites)

I can’t play videos though, that’s the one major thing it can’t do. The integrated GPU is unsupported so playing videos or 3d-gaming is out of the question.

BTW is there a lemmy instance/frontend I can use via CLI or links2?

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    20 days ago

    I also have an old shitty computer from Acer with 4gb of RAM lying around.

    I feel a bit guilty about not using it, but I’m already sharing my time between my Surface Go 1 (daily driver) and my girlfriend’s 2012 MacBook Pro, so I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

    If anyone has an idea, I’m listening 👂

    • maliciousonion@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      If it can play video at a reasonable quality, hook it up to a TV, fill it with torrented movies you want to watch and you’ll have your own home entertainment system.

      That’s one idea. If it can’t play high quality videos there are still a lot more uses for it.

  • gramgan@lemmy.ml
    4·
    20 days ago

    I’m curious why links2 over, say, w3m? It feels like none of the terminal browsers are as nice as they could be these days…

    • maliciousonion@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      3·
      20 days ago

      I had both installed and was using them side-by-side. links2 was easier to learn and configure so I chose it over w3m, then uninstalled w3m.

      Also edit: terminal browsers(at least links2) are surprisingly good if you just want read Wikipedia, browse memes, use search engines, and other static stuff once you get the hang of it.

  • notTheCat@lemmy.ml
    4·
    20 days ago

    Are you me? I have a very similar ASUS with similar hw and it’s rocking MX 32bit, if you want more cutting edge stuff, you can switch to 32bit Void (xbps is blazing fast, but the docs aren’t Arch-wiki-quality)

  • Papamousse@beehaw.org
    3·
    20 days ago

    I also have a netbook with an Atom N2600, I overclocked it from 1.6GHz to 2.0GHz, upgraded from 1GB to 3GB of RAM, and replaced the old HD with an SSD, I then installed MX Linux, 32 bits version, Xfce, and it works pretty well. Only huge webpages are slow, but everything else is about still usable

  • Ardyssian@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    19 days ago

    Hmm, wonder if I should attempt to do the same for my old Intel Laptop; currently not using because the Disk Read / Write seems pretty slow (HDD, constantly at 100%)