I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I’m thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?

In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.

  • yewler@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I revived an old laptop with arch and the i3 window manager which worked quite nice with my use case. I used vim for coding and qutebrowser for web browsing. I’m sure there’s a lightweight reading app that you can use from the keyboard, to complete the “never take your hands off the keyboard” vibe, if you’re anything like me and that sounds appealing.

    • Imnecomrade@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I haven’t been able or had the time to get the Nxyt browser–built in Lisp–to effectively work on my Gentoo machine, but I thought I should mention it because it looks like a nifty browser. I have been wanting to try w3m for a console web browser as well.