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Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
31–40 of 178 posts
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#32Did my whole engineering curriculum as my single computer, ran MATLAB and other JVM GUIs/IDEs on 1GB RAM/Atom N450. The build and display were horrendous, but that was a good companion to take notes during lectures and in the lab.
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#33I kept my old laptop (bought in 2007) alive for quite a while too. But last year I finally retired it. I also used archlinux 32 which worked fine for a while. But at some point the breakages really got too bad. I was using xfce4. For a while the xfce4-terminal was broken and would not start. That has the easy workaround of using xterm instead. But there were more breakages and it just started taking too much time. Quite a bit of software is ditching, or has ditched, 32-bit support.
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#34I bought a subsidised Windows EeePC 901 and stuck Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. Much more useable. Windows was laughably bad. It limited the number of open applications!
There was also a EeePC specific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyPeasy which was even better.
Since then I have installed various things for amusement, including a cut down Chromebook OS and the OLPC Linux. The limit was always the tiny root partition (4GB SSD). I had some limited success joining with the second SSD (16GB) using btrfs.
I think the albeit tiny SSD was this machine's saving grace compared to HDD models, in terms of speed.
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#35I would still be using my 1000HE if the mouse and power buttons hadn’t stopped working (would have put an ssd in it then). Sure the keyboard keys are a bit wobbly but otherwise I really loved that machine. Nice form factor. Would love to be able to get a new 400$-ish 10-11” netbook with 6+ hour battery that would fly with some minimal Linux. Recommendations?
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#36My current laptop is a 15 year old freebie from work. It does everything I need it to. Except for run all the boosted agent frameworks. It chokes on open code, Claude Code, I don't dare try codex.
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#37These 2008-2010 era netbooks are impossible to use as a desktop. They were already painfully slow when they were new, so much so that OEMs shipped them dual booting a stripped down OS. I had an HP Mini. It had a weird 1024x600 display panel, and a lot of applications expect you to have at least 1024x768. Sometimes apps would work fine until they opened a modal that was just a bit too tall, and you had to pray that En…
> Sometimes apps would work fine until they opened a modal that was just a bit too tall, and you had to pray that Enter or Escape did something reasonable. Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window? https://xkcd.com/1479/ On the Xfce desktop at least there's a nice shortcut, alt+drag with left mouse button to move any window, and alt+drag with right mouse button to resize…
I use bettertouchtool on macos to replicate exactly that behavior (and many more).
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#38It was Acer EEE 1000HA (very similar to the one from this article) which made me to use Linux. Eventually even a new one under XP was terribly slow. To that moment I was quite enjoying Windows but this device opened a door into computers for me. I never used Windows again and learned a ton by building GMA950 drivers as they were not shipped with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (omg). On one had terrible device on other hand I guess I wouldn’t start using Linux/macos and learned how to code. So lucky device, I guess?
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#39My current laptop is a 15 year old freebie from work. It does everything I need it to. Except for run all the boosted agent frameworks. It chokes on open code, Claude Code, I don't dare try codex.
Codex CLI is written in Rust and significantly more efficient than Claude Code. I had no trouble running it on a 2012 laptop. VSCode/standard browsers were the main problem software, as one would expect.
Re: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux
#40These 2008-2010 era netbooks are impossible to use as a desktop. They were already painfully slow when they were new, so much so that OEMs shipped them dual booting a stripped down OS. I had an HP Mini. It had a weird 1024x600 display panel, and a lot of applications expect you to have at least 1024x768. Sometimes apps would work fine until they opened a modal that was just a bit too tall, and you had to pray that En…
> Sometimes apps would work fine until they opened a modal that was just a bit too tall, and you had to pray that Enter or Escape did something reasonable. Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window? https://xkcd.com/1479/ On the Xfce desktop at least there's a nice shortcut, alt+drag with left mouse button to move any window, and alt+drag with right mouse button to resize…
Windows also has shortcuts to retrieve off-screen windows, but it's more difficult to remember so I have to google it every time this situation comes up.