While you're absolutely correct, in my personal experience Manjaro has been perfectly stable even with somewhat heavy use of the AUR.
crunchpaste
joined 2 years ago
To be honest it's possible they're not joking.
Linux mint is insanely user friendly, to the point where my father istalled it by himself as his first linux distro long after the first symptoms of dementia appeared and used it for years.
Exactly. Mate tried emulating this behaviour, but it wasn't very successful.
As far as I know Ubuntu had to patch a lot of packages to make it work properly. I guess no one has the manpower to do that for such a niche feature.
I've had more breaking updates in Ubuntu LTS releases than arch based ones. Especially when at some point you always find yourself forced to use PPAs.
To me, being "noob unfriendly" is disabling flatpak to push a (semi) proprietary broken mess.
Why not arch?
I've always wanted to run a media server (Jellyfin, not Plex), but thought you need something more capable to have a good experience. Am I wrong?
You can do plenty with any old paperweight. The difficult part is thinking if what you need it to do and if that thing is worth the higher electricity usage of older tech.
A pihole then?
You can sqeeze plenty of use from these laptops, especially the really light ones.
My gf works as an arts teacher in a primary school and needed something very small and light that she could carry every day to school.
The usage is mostly very light browsing (the school system, some Pinterest), showing the kids some reference images and the ocasional document editing and printing.
For a piece if what essentially is e-waste it handles that admirably, and because of the atom processor it sips power, which still gives it a few hours of battery life after about 10 yeas of ownership.
Tldr: Don't underestimate how useful an old laptop running a minimal linux disto can be for a casual user.
Even if they run only a window manager 2gb of RAM is just not enough for web nowadays.
Recently resurrected a 10-ish year old Lenovo Chromebook-like with an atom CPU and 4gb RAM, running nothing but qtile as a DE and it's struggling with more than 5 tabs open.
Upgrade the RAM to at least 4gb, preferably 8 and the HDD to SSD.
Also, don't bother with "lightweight" browsers, in my experience Firefox simply runs much faster.
For one, the LEDs mess with your sleep. Some wavelength of light make your body think it's day therefore inhibiting melatonin production (the hormone that makes you sleepy).
Furhermore, a general advice for better sleep is to keep electronics outside if the bedroom, as they are too psychologically engaging (e.g. "I'll just check one more post on Lemmy").
You're talking about Kate Bush, right?