I used one as a replacement for a "desktop computer" for 7+ years
Here, "desktop" means the form factor not the interface
I used NetBSD as the OS. I never tried to use Windows. It was during this time that I stopped using X11 entirely, i.e., no "desktop" metaphor, no terminal emulator programs, and began staying in VGA textmode 100% of the time
If I needed to view graphics I sent the files to another computer running graphical OS on the LAN but not connected to the internet. At the time, this was mainly an iPad
As a matter of practice I never connected Apple computers to the internet
These ASUS netbooks indeed had a slow processor but the amount I accomplished with this computer was substantial. I created bootable USB sticks that booted to rootfs in RAM and never touched disk, an immutable, custom OS that resembles ChromeOS today, but better (no Chrome or other software written and controlled by an adtrech corporation). I could pull out the stick after boot and use the USB port for something else.^1 NetBSD kernels compiled quickly enough and I did not use QEMU for testing
1. It was perplexing to me to read about the problems people had with SD cards when the RaspberryPi appeared. I pull the SD card out after boot, the OS runs entirely from RAM
I still have this netboook. There is some issue with the power. I have thought about trying to fix it
> A tip if you have one of those laying around and it always ran a 32-bit OS is to check if the CPU is really 32-bit only. Only the very first Atom generation was 32-bit, but the next generations had poor 64-bit driver support on Windows, so OEMs shipped it as a 32-bit machine. Not the case for OP’s netbook, theirs is really 32-bit only.
A lot of netbooks will lock the CPU into 32-bit mode in the BIOS, so getting them to boot a 64-bit OS also requires patching the BIOS. It's doable but has limited benefits when they're limited to 2-4 GB of RAM anyway.
Back in the day there was no real benefit. Today it's different as most Linux distros don't really care much about supporting 32 bit anymore.
On Debian at least, Alt+grab, or the window menu "move" could save your day.
Booting a 32 bit OS was fine, but 64 bit OS' generally came with a 64 bit bootloader, so you had to do a special song and dance to load a 32 bit bootloader with a 64 bit OS.
It was by far my favorite laptop I’ve ever had. I put an SSD in it, though, which made a pretty huge difference.
Run Alpine Linux from RAM. That will consume about 125MB with the standard install. Set up persistence so you save changes. Install a lightweight window manager and use a lightweight browser like qutebrowser.
Even thought Alpine uses musl you can still get apps like Obsidian to run. I can't remember how though but this whole setup was usable on a PC that had a built in 56K modem.
Unfortunately its CMOS battery ran out and when I went in to replace it I had to unplug a few ribbon cables which of course promptly snapped the now-brittle plastic connectors. Its been sitting on a shelf waiting to be revived once again ever since... I miss that little thing.
People talk about modern Microsoft and how much they do for open source have such short memories. Microsoft used to do everything they can to kill open source and even referred to the ecosystem as “communism”.
Or I suppose it could be treated like a CLI only info display panel running an ssh client and the "htop" output from a remote server.
Not a snappy experience even with the light IceWM based desktop but useable and faster than some corporate PCs I've used in educational settings in the past.
[1] antiX strikes me as a lot less work than the OAs hand crafted Arch install but the whole point is you can do what you want with free software. https://antixlinux.com/
Also Alpine Linux (32 bit, the extended edition for better hw) will run faster than Antix.
Not just for obsolete systems, sometimes a full screen application might pick a tiny desktop resolution as well, and not properly restore the resolution, so you could need to deal with a too-big dialog box in that situation as well.
On Linux it's just Alt+drag anywhere on the window to move it.
Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window?
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 it. That's honestly the Linux thing I miss most when using any other OS.
Not just the title bar, but often also e.g. half of the settings and the Cancel/Save/Ok buttons.
Basically the screen was 600 pixels in height, but the modal was designed after 2005 so it was 768 pixels tall, and you would get a cropped modal missing maybe 10% top and 10% bottom pixels that you couldn't interact with via mouse, and you couldn't resize nor move (either because it was fixed size, or because all corners that would allow you to do so were off-screen).
Mostly, yes. I had an acer aspire one d250 (similar specs to that in the article) and i worked mostly okay under linux for light development work, meaning i was in high school doing java development with emacs and running apache ant by hand.
Other than that yeah they were painfully slow.
Also i bought a similar machine at a flea market for like 20€ and was sorely disappointed to find out it had a Broadcom wifi chip which is a pain to work with and i’m not really interested in buying an atheros card for another 20€.
The external network card support was better than macbooks' though. Go figure.
Not really. Proper laptops had intel centrino wifi which worked decently well with binary blobs and atheros cards needed no binary blob at all and worked out of the box.
For the web I use DIllo and a custom build of Otter Browser against the older QT5 Webkit engine.
For web media I use streamlink and yt-dlp.