Over the weekend I was given a crap 2in1 notebook. It is 10 years old and even by standards back then had low end hardware (MSRP was 300 Euro according to some googling).

The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon I completely forgot existed and many distributions no longer support.

Not only does postmarketOS support 32bit UEFI, thanks to its smartphone focus it comes with zram preconfigured. Installation was easy using the graphical installer for generic x86-64.

So now I run a fully featured desktop, KDE Plasma, on it. None of that “lightweight” stuff that sacrifices features and usability for a few megabytes of RAM.

I only tweaked it a little bit. Firefox ran like shit. Chromium was better in that regard but for whatver reason YouTube specifically kept logging me out. Also RAM ran out once and Chromium was force closed by the OS.

I ended up installing KDE’s Falkon browser which offers the benefits of Chromium’s rendering speed without the logging out of YouTube part. It’s also a bit less resource intensive, yet comes wih an ad blocker and support for user scripts which relieves the lack of proper extensions.

pmOS doesn’t come with swap by default. I added a swap file which is quickly done. It’s barely used since switching to Falkon, currently only 100MB.

YouTube video playback at 1080p is smooth. Zero problems with suspend so far.

I’m not sure if it’s the result of defective hardware or just driver incompatibilities but Bluetooth is not recognized (bummer) and the camera isn’t either (don’t care for it).

Long story short:

I rescued a crap PC from the scrap pile. It’s now genuinely usable, albeit with the aformentioned caveats.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    that hardware is in no way an extreme case to run a linux distro on. Just a normal walk in the park.

    “The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon […] many distributions no longer support.”

    So no

      • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        Support for 32 bit UEFI on 64 bit Linux is a matter of facts, not a matter to come to an agreement.

            • lauha@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              3 days ago

              There is a distribution made exactlt for low end computers that natively support it. Niche but not very extreme.

              • supermarkus@feddit.orgOPEnglish
                2·
                2 days ago

                There is a distribution made exactlt for low end computers that natively support it. Niche but not very extreme.

                The hardware is on the ultra low end and mainstream distributions do not support it. Nobody but you talked about it being an “extreme niche”. You just made that up to distract from your claim that my setup is “Just a normal walk in the park” which clearly it is not.

                • lauha@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  2 days ago

                  No, I was talking about it being low end but disagreed on it being extreme low end. Then someone talked something else and argument was sidetracked.