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?

    • maliciousonion@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      61·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, the processor does. The laptop as a whole doesn’t.

      I did some searching and this may be because Asus has disabled the functionality in the BIOS, or much of the peripherals don’t support 32-bit. I have no idea what it is tbh, and I don’t really care at this point.

      • Suppoze@beehaw.org
        4·
        2 months ago

        With 1GB RAM you’re better off with 32bit anyway, as applications will use less memory. Sick setup though, I hate electronic waste so it delights me to see sim old tech getting a second life.

        • Hupf@feddit.org
          3·
          2 months ago

          x32 mode may be an option to take advantage of some more registers/instructions, but I’d assume not many distros support that as a platform.

      • silverdiamond@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        there might be an BIOS update you could try i don’t think it will fix 64 bit and even if it did 32bit apps probably take less memory for storing addresses.
        on my AOD255E 64bit just works :tm:

        • Hupf@feddit.org
          4·
          2 months ago

          I have an Asus EeePC where the latest BIOS update straight up removed the option for AHCI and hard wired IDE compat mode. Luckily, I had kept the previous version and downgrade was possible.

      • TheL321@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I have a netbook with the same CPU and it works, but there are no GPU drivers, even on Windows for x64