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?

  • superkret
    13·
    2 months ago

    The old.lemmy.world frontend (also old… on other instances) works in links2.
    There’s currently no other way to browse Lemmy in a text browser on a TTY that actually works, I’ve tried them all recently (including browsh, carbonyl, neonmodem).

    • GlenTheFrog@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 months ago

      With the amount of Linux nerds on Lemmy, I’m shocked there’s an a TUI client for it.

      Maybe I’ll have to make one someday.

      • superkret
        1·
        2 months ago

        There is one (Neonmodem), and it seems to work for some, but it never showed any posts when I tried it, and I tried it on several different distros, client versions, Lemmy accounts and home instances.