Anybody have good guides on repurposing old 32bit laptops? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by AlbigensianGhoul@lemmygrad.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[-] INeedMana@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gnome is quite heavy, before you succumb to the void of choosing the best prompt format, try some other, lighter WMs. I like Fluxbox very much; XFCE is lighter than Gnome/KDE but still similar; i3 is also lightweight.
I guess there might be some light Firefox forks, or maybe even go back to iceweasel?

As for command line, check out:

tmux
zsh (it's completion mechanisms are imo better than bash)
mc
how to define your shortcuts as functions inside every login shell, instead of using aliases which are easier but have limitations

Btw, slackware still maintains x32
And there's also arch32

this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023

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