I have an old Asus EeePC 1015T netbook with an HDMI (and VGA) output, a screen that glitches if I’m holding it wrong, a huge, tired, unreliable battery, a noisy fan that fails to cool it to less than skin-burning temperatures, and slightly less than 1 GB of RAM. I’ve seen Xubuntu, then Lubuntu, become slowly unusable on it; I’ve tried to install Arch then Sway, but although the device got kinda less sluggish, the leaning curve for a tiling window manager was still too high.
So here’s a thought experiment: could I craft a Linux setup with a themeable yet cohesive Windows 98-like UI, that I can plug to an old monitor (1280x1024 should be enough) and that can be just responsive enough to do basic, focused tasks (writing, listening to music and webradios, browsing Wikipedia, perhaps playing Doom) using this kind of very limited hardware? The idea would be to have some sort of reliability: instead of installing an old distro and freezing all updates, I’d ideally go for a modern basis that I can upgrade without worrying of watching my setup collapsing on itself; so I could reproduce this setup on other, similarly old computers, and turn them into retro distraction-free appliances where you could chill with a classic Windows feel and Winamp themes.
I have some ideas but I’m not sure about the best approach. I’ve tried an immutable Fedora image (Blue95), but after a full day and night of waiting for the setup and rebase to complete, the end result was way too slow to be usable. Then I went for BunsenLabs on a Debian Trixie basis: it works okay performance-wise, but there’s a lot of obscure menu items pointing to small apps to customize (you have to know what a “conky” or a “tint2” is, and also understand that the default panel is a third different thing). I’m thinking of trying postmarketOS, since the Alpine base sounds lightweight enough, but I havent figured out how to install it on my EeePC.
Could Wayland be possible with these hardware limitations? If so, how should I setup it? I guess labwc (pictured above) is the best fit for a Win9x experience, but what is needed afterwards? LXQt or Xfce or something else?
I’m curious to hear your thoughts!
Take a look at Q4OS, with its standard Trinity Setup you get something resembling Windows XP, but i think the Windows 98 look could also be easily achieved with some theming. The needed minimal specifications for the Trinity Desktop also look good: 350MHz CPU / 256MB RAM / 3GB diskspace
I’m not sure what happened to the old Redmond widget theme, which was essentially a transplant of the Windows 9X widget style, but if you’re not picky, the .Net theme in the tdeartwork package will probably be Good Enough (or you could go for the different-but-equally-retro CDE/Motif experience). TDE itself, as KDE3, was originally expected to run on an average PC made 20+ years ago—I ran it for years on a single-core Athlon64 with 1GB RAM (and those were pretty good specs for a machine of that era). I don’t know what else Q4OS might be carrying along with it, though.
If you want to go even lighter, look for something offering Fluxbox or Openbox as the GUI—they have enough stuff in them to be useful launchers out of the box, but don’t have the overhead of the true DEs (configuring them may require you to mess around in text files, but you only have to do it once).
Anyway, your main issue is going to be getting any modern browser to work on a machine that constrained. (If your interest is only in looking at Wikipedia, Konqueror, which ships with TDE, can be made to mostly work if you force the use of Wikipedia’s “vector” skin, but the current default skin breaks search and looks like ass. Konqueror’s browser code is way out of date and not recommended for general Internet use.)
Vanilla Debian on my old netbook does alright. I think my desktop is xfce.
Only thing better I’ve used is antiX. I moved away from that one though since they insist on not using systemd and it got to be too much of a hassle to work around (lots of packages assume systemd is your init). I think Void Linux is supposed to be similar.
I also use plain Debian on my Samsung NC10 Netbook, my main problem was the 32bit CPU! Ubuntu drops/dropped 32 bit support, in Debian there seem to be no plans yet. LXDE (preconfigured OpenBox) and XFCE are working fine. But as I said, I upgraded to an SSD and to the maximum of 2GB RAM.
Did you try puppy linux? It has excellent support for older hardware. I remember that there were some older versions that would even run flawlessly on my 192MB RAM ancient desktop, over a decade ago. Give it a try
I hadn’t tried it but maybe give this Desktop Environment a try? It’s called Enlightenment.
Tiny Core Linux? I’ve never used it but I’ve seen videos of it running really well on super old machines. Like this one.
I have a machine with specs like those where I installed Haiku.
I don’t daily drive it, but it’s fun to use and it’s quite snappy.
This is gonna be a lot of work, like, a lot a lot of work.
You’re on the right track, I think antix is your best starting point. Its the closest you’ll get to a fully featured distro. Damn Small Linux would maybe be my next choice, but I’m not sure if development is ongoing.
Regardless, you want something without systemd. Im personally hopeless without it, but there are plenty of people who daily drive openrc, runit, etc so it’s possible with determination.
id probably do 3gb of swap, maybe more if you are crashing a lot. I suspect even if you keep memory usage down you will be swapping A LOT. If you had even 1gb more memory I’d be less worried, but you’re cutting it close.
If that’s still not light enough, you could try using CDE or Motif as a desktop.
You were thinking linux windows’like, but did you thought about React OS ?
react os is unusable
Isn’t React OS unstable? Last time (and this was like maybe couple years), I remember watching a YouTuber trying to run older Windows applications and game and get the Blue Screen of Death
To be fair you don’t need Wayland for any of those tasks. I think I would suggest antiX here. It’s surprisingly highly customizable as well.
By the way I think Wayland would work on that hardware, possibly with something like River. But unless you find yourself dotfiles, the learning curve is kinda steep.
I daily drive River and don’t think the learning curve is steep. They provide an example init file and just use
man riverctlto customise it. Only part that took me a while to get my head around was the tag system.It’s been a while since I used River but it’s great to see that they provide an example init after the first installation now. Setting everything from scratch was kinda tough at first but once everything is set, it was great to use. Well, after using bspwm for years, River was a logical upgrade for me. I guess the hardest part was the direct transition of my polybar config into waybar config, but that’s not directly River related.
Oh yeah I guess if there’s no example init that is gonna be a lot harder. I just started with the example init and customised from there; found it very easy, and enjoyed being able to programmatically configure my graphical environment. In practice I didn’t make that much use of it—I have some for loops in my init script, and some helper functions defined, and I do some simple bitwise arithmetic for tag configuration, but otherwise it’s defined in a way that would translate 1:1 with a declarative config. Still, it’s a cool way of doing things, and once 0.4.0 comes out I imagine you can go with even more “hackable” options with certain River window managers.
Yeah, I’m waiting for River 0.4.0 and I can’t wait to try it out and hack around with it. I’d love to add “a Custom WM for River” to my project portfolio.
Yeah, it’s quite fun to meddle with River. I had to switch to KDE because I had a bug with various FPS on my dual monitor setup. Not River related but since River doesn’t intervene with that I had to use programs like way-displays etc. Other than this I actually miss River, my scripts. I don’t have that bug on KDE so currently that’s where I’m staying. At least I managed to make KDE exactly like a WM, so not gonna complain, other than the bloat. :)
River is brilliant. Hope more distros come pre-installed (and configured) with it.
That’s a shame that you had that bug. I have two monitors and River works well for me.
Have you checked out MaoMaoWM, Niri, etc? If you want a tiling compositor there are still other options. Not sure if you specifically want dynamic tiling, but if you’re good with manual tiling there is of course Sway.
Yeah, I tried different workarounds to fix it (and one time I was really close) but that wasn’t good for my productivity so I postponed using River. I’ll get back some time later, probably the bug would be already gone too.
Anyway, while Niri is cool, it isn’t for me. Haven’t heard of MaoMaoWM before but it seems the name changed into MangoWC. However it seems like BSPWM with more juice, which I liked. Added to my stars and will follow its development, just like I do with River.
I used i3 many years before bspwm but when I learned about bspwm I never went back to i3. I can say the same with Sway, I tried it but it’s essentially i3. When there is River, I wouldn’t use it. :)
Ummm, go to suckless and get dwm maybe? Idk, but enjoy the adventure!
If
the learning curve for a tiling window manager is too high
I highly doubt they’d go for dwm
fluxbox with alpine linux has been the most performant setup for me, all the wayland DEs were pretty sluggish
The lightest Windows 95-esque setup I’ve achieved was IceWM on Debian. Manually install the GUI to avoid unnecessary packages. Around 200 MB RAM usage from cold boot and very snappy on an Atom netbook with 2 GB RAM. With zram swap set to 50% of total RAM (swapping to the tiny, slow eMMC proved frustrating), I could comfortably browse most websites and work in LibreOffice. If you use a no-frills distro (like Debian), performance shouldn’t change too much with updates.
It should come with a Windows 95 theme, but some settings are available only in the config files. Adding a theme like Raleigh for GTK3 will make it look more cohseive without consuming much extra resources.
As for Wayland, I think the only performant options would be labwc or a modification of Weston. I’ve no experience with XFCE on Wayland, but that would open up the option of the Chicago95 theme.
You’re trying way too hard to make a very specific set of hardware work.
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The chip in there is going to have a 2GB memory limit, even if it you could expand it and found a module for sale.
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The CPU is an old style Intel N or C, both of which have just awful TDP at that age. You’d also have to have it plugged in constantly and draining more power because the battery is certainly dead.
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The addressable memory is almost certainly only going to be working for 32-bit without a BIOS hack. I say this because the majority of these produced were 32, but very few were 64. Telling the difference should be obvious by trying to install a microkernel.
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Even if you had the best set of circumstances - 64bit, 2GB memory - the rest of the hardwre5is likely to no longer be very compatible with modern kernels. Network, audio, power saving…etc. Almost all certainly will not work as expected.
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A $100 SoC board will have better outcomes and cost efficiency for running in general.
I just don’t see the effort paying off here in taking what was already antiquated hardware when it was produced and making it work now just because it exists.
To your questions:
- No. No modern GUI stack will work with it.
- Wayland won’t work with the available memory, at least not for long. Launching a browser would probably start OOMKilling things on any modern distro.
I agree that the hardware may be wholly inefficient in that case: it is, after all, a low-cost netbook that wasn’t really snappy to use even back in the day. I could grab a second-hand ThinkCentre for 50 euros, slap Blue95 or Linux Mint on it and have a very capable computer. But here, I’m trying to apply permacomputing principles, in a reductio ad absurdum kind of way. Machines that ran Windows 98 back in the day only needed a quarter of RAM to do this stuff (obviously I’m not talking about browsing the modern web or launching Electron apps), and this specific netbook was sold with Windows 7, so what I’m trying to experiment here is: how hard could it be to achieve that efficiency using currently available Linux software (and not a 2010 distro, although that’s a thing I can experiment as well)? Your answers seems to point to “actually very hard and not worth the effort”, which seems a very valid point. But I’m still curious to see how far we can go with old hardware, and how the Linux infrastructure has taken advantage of the capability increase of computers since then (that was why I asked about Wayland for instance). So thanks for the feedback!
If you just want it to run something, then just install Alpine on it. Will run fine without the extra desktop stuff complicating things.
I just don’t see the effort paying off here in taking what was already antiquated hardware when it was produced and making it work now just because it exists.
I take it you don’t know the Linux community very well. One of the most common uses I see is getting use out of outdated hardware.
Of course I don’t, you’re totally right. My contributions since 1998 mean I have zero idea of how to speak to common sense.
Using antique hardware to run things is a fool’s errand, and always has been. It’s ridiculous to run outmoded, inefficient, and ineffective hardware for any general purpose.
If there was a HUGE community out there who really needed something to work with Linux (a la Asahi), then I’d say go for it.
This is a dumb waste of time with little payoffs except to say you did it. No community benefits.
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I3-wm stacked layout
Just alt-tab between programs
Have you considered just running an old version of Linux?
