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Retrocomputing

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5
  • Thanks for that fresh input! For web browsing, I wouldn't use that bloat of Firefox on such a system. Netsurf, Dillo or Links 2.x are IMHO the proper choices for a GUI browser there. I also wouldn't use bloaty systemd as init system. Using sysvinit (still alive, version 3.00 about to be released) or OpenRC (from Gentoo) saves a lot of disk space and RAM. A boot up time of a few minutes is well known and expected, yes. That was already the case with Debian 8 Jessie on my Thinkpad 760ED with 48 MB RAM. I though don't see why a specific GPU should be necessary. Commented Sep 15, 2021 at 21:41
  • Radeon card can run composite desktop in a meaningful way. Also fast graphics-mode console, perhaps due to KMS. Commented Sep 16, 2021 at 9:24
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    Firefox and Chrome will be near unusable on a 660MHz system these days. Let alone 66. Commented Sep 16, 2021 at 20:15
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    FreeBSD 12 can not boot on my i586 machines, though it claims to support i486; this is also reported by other users, see bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=250755. Commented Dec 5, 2021 at 1:13
  • Composite desktops don't make sense as they AFAIK need much more RAM as the compositor always needs to render the whole screen and not just a window. That's also the reason why Raspberry Pi OS falls back to non-composite rendering on models with less RAM. Commented Dec 22, 2021 at 23:53