I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I’m thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?
In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.
Linux Mint Debian Edition 32-bit. but like there’s no way you’re gonna do anything useful with it. source: I have a C2D, so at least double as fast, max 4 GB RAM (doesn’t use all of it), X1600 graphics. that thing is unusable for anything.
granted, if you wanna enter your thoughts in some rudimentary text editor and just go CLI only, maybe you can have a whole week before you realize it isn’t worth it. huge power draw, terrible performance, a battery that lasts half a second and a screen that you can sorta-maybe-sometimes read.
quad core laptops with IPS screens that can run up to 16 GB are like $50 nowadays. throw it out.
Feel free to send me the $50 bucks and I’ll buy one. I still won’t throw out perfectly functional hardware. Until then I’ll make use of what I have, thank you very much.