Over the weekend I was given a crap 2in1 notebook. It is 10 years old and even by standards back then had low end hardware (MSRP was 300 Euro according to some googling).
The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon I completely forgot existed and many distributions no longer support.
Not only does postmarketOS support 32bit UEFI, thanks to its smartphone focus it comes with zram preconfigured. Installation was easy using the graphical installer for generic x86-64.
So now I run a fully featured desktop, KDE Plasma, on it. None of that "lightweight" stuff that sacrifices features and usability for a few megabytes of RAM.
I only tweaked it a little bit. Firefox ran like shit. Chromium was better in that regard but for whatver reason YouTube specifically kept logging me out. Also RAM ran out once and Chromium was force closed by the OS.
I ended up installing KDE’s Falkon browser which offers the benefits of Chromium’s rendering speed without the logging out of YouTube part. It's also a bit less resource intensive, yet comes wih an ad blocker and support for user scripts which relieves the lack of proper extensions.
pmOS doesn't come with swap by default. I added a swap file which is quickly done. It's barely used since switching to Falkon, currently only 100MB.
YouTube video playback at 1080p is smooth. Zero problems with suspend so far.
I'm not sure if it's the result of defective hardware or just driver incompatibilities but Bluetooth is not recognized (bummer) and the camera isn't either (don't care for it).
Long story short:
I rescued a crap PC from the scrap pile. It's now genuinely usable, albeit with the aformentioned caveats.
Great job. As I see it the real problem is that low-end Wintel laptops seem to be going away, replaced first by Chromebooks and soon probably by Android laptop edition, which presumably will have the non-Intel architecture and weird blobs and locked bootloader of any smartphone. Or is this too pessimistic?
Nah mate, it's hard to be too pessimistic these days. That's probably just the right amount of pessimism.
I think devices like the Framework 12 continue to be available but RAM and SSD costs won't necessarily mean that lower end performance will not necessarily mean afforable, at least all the way through 2026.
Hmm. Having trouble parsing your negatives but I think you're saying "expensive".
What bothers me is that a decade ago there were loads of Linux-compatible budget netbooks on sale at every big-box retailer, whereas there seems to be nothing today under 500 bucks/euro except Chromebooks, and nothing at all with a smallish screen except mega-expensive ultrabooks. It's becoming a problem.