If you've discovered my tiny blog by meeting my Mii via StreetPass (NetPass), I just want to mention that I would have included any other social media account of mine if it weren't for the character limit. I'm active on the Fediverse – Mastodon and Pixelfed – and on Geminispace (proxy link can be found in “Socials”). I also got an account on Bluesky which I'm barely active on but created in case some people don't find the Fediverse appealing. If you want to see my media library and perhaps even download some software or a manual, I donate my stuff to the Internet Archive; a separate repo on my GitHub will be created with stuff rejected by IA in the future.
On this day in 2014, I was using my mother's Fujitsu computer as usual. Windows XP went into a sudden BSOD and immediately revoked the product activation, effectively locking us out entirely due to the original Recovery Disc having disappeared (we either lost it or one of my uncles, who did the initial setup but has a habit of never returning anything he borrows, kept it).
After installing antiX and encountering the same thermal issues I witnessed on both Devuan and Salix, alongside a desktop experience much worse than on both, there wasn't a point in testing the remaining distributions targeting old 32-bit machines. It became apparent that all distributions still under active development either long abandoned optimizations for netbooks or never offered them in the first place. What made this realization particularly frustrating were quite recent forum posts on Reddit and other sites still recommending distributions such as Lubuntu, which are WAY too heavy on such devices not in terms of RAM or the type of storage device (“install a SDD” is almost always being recommend by those people for some reason) but of CPU demands. All tested distributions, in fact, performed smoothly, however my netbook eventually started to smell like melting chips and, because sensor readings turned out to be largely useless, I had to use my (even less reliable) hands to estimate this machine's CPU temperature, which were MUCH higher than all of my notebooks constantly reporting temperatures above 48°C.
After a week of testing all kinds of Linux distributions, I settled with Devuan and Salix for the final test. I initially planned on writing just one post for both tests, however Devuan managed to be THAT weird (and frustrating) that this post would have gotten too long and convoluted.
Spoilers: I'm close to losing my sanity halfway through this and it may or not be entertaining to read.
Silly me for having made all my Linux partitions too small for VM tests, so there was no way around going back to my old setup on Windows 10. Right off the bat, I was greeted with a BSOD, ironically foreshadowing how most virtual tests eventually turned out and forced me to improvise.
For quite some time, I've toyed with the idea of giving my very ancient netbook, an eMachines eM250, a second life as, what I like to call it, a “tiny typewriter”. Due to its pleasant keyboard and the fact that is much more lightweight than any of my proper laptops, it still may fulfill a decent job as a simple typing machine I can take with me during field trips without having to worry too much about accidentally breaking it.
Since mid-2021, I use the distribution that its known for its annoying “I use Arch btw” meme. “Annoying”, as you often can tell that they don't actually use it in an “ironic” way, despite claiming so. I installed Arch via Archcraft, slowly stripped it off its Archcraft-specific repos and packages (only keeping a few for testing purposes), and largely called it a day. While Archcraft shipped with some defaults that go against what “vanilla Arch” is preaching, Arch itself appears to be guilty of the very same sins it denounces.
My main issue largely focuses on the people behind Arch due to being the root of my recent hiccups with the OS, makepkg.conf now being automatically overwritten to make the work of a single, non-Arch dev “easier”, the stark contrast between Arch Wiki pages and its very few contributors and huge gaps in editing histories, the Arch forum pretty much being dominated by less than a handful of users, and the rather-old GRUB debacle that affected children of Arch and any Arch user using GRUB, which initially was treated as a non-issue because one out of the two Arch testers claimed “works for me” and thus resulted in the issue being addressed four days AFTER the outcry.
Not really satisfied with the pre-configured bspwm session that was shipped with Archcraft, I decided to get familar with other window managers that may provide me a simple fallback solution to my main session running Openbox. As much as I tried to give i3wm yet-another-fair chance, I just can't warm up to it, so I eventually settled with a cousin of Openbox, namenly Fluxbox.
