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!
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. :)