I know Debian and others can breathe life into older machines. But i wonder if there are any distros with serious optimizations that I haven’t heard of. I’ve already tried MX Linux on an old Thinkpad SL400, and didn’t see any difference from plain Debian.
Update: thanks for the great suggestions. Forgot to say many distros feel zippy and fast until you open a web browser. Appreciate your thoughts on which web browser to use too. So far I’ve had a positive experience with Thorium and Chromium.
Just install Arch without a desktop environment.
It’s kinda surprising how much you can do in just a tty, the only thing I can’t think of a method for rn is viewing/editing documents.
What is the extension of document? I bet you money it’s possible in terminal. PDF? docx?
I mean any kind of document, so yes, PDF, docx, rtf, etc.
Thinking about it, isn’t lesspipe able to view documents?
Literally all the extensions you mentioned can be viewed and edited in terminal by various tools.
I don’t know the tools, but that means you can probably do everything* in a tty without ever installing a graphical environment
*I almost forgot spreadsheets and presentations
Do you actually want to know the tools for each of the extensions you mentioned or just having a conversation here?