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.
Furthermore, I’d recommend disabling the compositor. This disables animations, transparency, etc, however it speeds up the experience drastically on antiquated hardware. This is what I use (with almost no other changes) on an old netbook with 512mb of ram and a single core CPU.
I’m lucky, mine has 3gb ram and 2 cores, so it works just fine without any changes.