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.
Antix is pretty nice (and communist). Kris de Decker has some ideas about that, might wanna check out: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stopped-buying-new-laptops/
Antix looks pretty good and that article is fantastic. Thanks!
Hey, small follow-up, how does Antix compare to Arch? As in, I’ve never used a systemd-less distro before, anything specific I need to be aware of. I’ll probably go with it just because it seems so lightweight and like a good learning experience.
Never used arch, but I do recall having problems with the more “streamlined” stuff like flatpaks and the like. It’s not like hopeless to use, but some of these modern linux conveniences seem to depend on some part of systemd. I’m no linux expert anyway, I’m using Debian 12 right now. You’ll probably have to do some figuring out. That being said, Antix’s forum is very nice, and whatever questions you may have will probably be quickly answered there. (The dev, anticapitalista, posts all the time).