Post by catsbark on Aug 29, 2024 19:36:16 GMT
I started using personal computers when the IBM PC was king. PC-DOS 2.1 was the state-of-the-art operating system. Believe it or not, when Microsoft released MS-DOS (almost exactly the same), it was a subversive act. With an Intel 8088 processor, 640 K (that's KILObytes) was all you could access without special drivers, A 20 MB (that's MEGAbyte) hard drive made you lord of infinite space. Over the years, I used essentially every version of MS-DOS and Windows, and a few versions of MacOS. I made Linux my principal OS when support for Win 7 stopped.
My daily driver since 2018 has been a Dell Inspiron running Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon. A year ago, I bought an Acer Chromebook C738T through eBay for less than $50. It has an Intel Celeron N3150 processor (4 cores, 1.6 GHz), and 4 GB RAM. Sadly, storage is a 16 GB emmc chip that is soldered in place, so there's not much room to work with. Since it was well past AUE (Automatic Update Expiry), I used suggested workarounds for running outdated Chromebooks for a few months, then I flashed the UEFI in order to be able to install Linux. With so little storage space, I looked at lightweight, minimalist distros. The really small ones, like Puppy and Bunsen, are just too much trouble to install. (I think a distro should at least provide a good Installer app.) Most of the Debian-based distros didn't recognize the touchscreen out of the box. antiX recognized the touchscreen, but not the keyboard. Bodhi 7.0 worked right out of the box.
I installed Bodhi, but there was so little space left that I uninstalled all of the applications and got the footprint down to less than 9 GB. I thought that was enough free space that I wouldn't need to be concerned about an update filling the drive leaving me unable to boot. I used my BodhiBook that way for a few months and found myself very pleased with the results. Contemplating expanding my intended uses, I purchased a 64 GB SD card and reinstalled. I put /home and /var on the SD card and everything else on the emmc. I think there's enough room for updates to expand the system files and a reasonable amount of data storage.
For a distro with such a small development team, I think Bodhi is a very polished operating system. But please, don't follow Ubuntu's practice of force-feeding Snap.