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?

  • sleen@lemmy.zipEnglish
    16·
    1 month ago

    I’m still surprised there are 32 bit apps out there that are supported still. It’s good to know there are people who are working to prevent e-waste.

    Also that links2 thing is quite interesting.

    • maliciousonion@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      11·
      1 month ago

      Also that links2 thing is quite interesting.

      It’s a CLI program that can browse websites (only reads HTML). It can even display images, download files, etc… A lightweight and fast little webpage loader, I love it :)

    • notthebees@reddthat.com
      8·
      1 month ago

      There’s quite a few. I have bunsenlabs helium installed on a 32 bit pentium M laptop. It’s very usable, for a 20 yo single core machine. For basic things, it’s still fine. I do have some gpu acceleration though which is a benefit.