I was playing around with an old laptop dual booting Fedora KDE and W11. And Fedora on fresh boot was using the same/more ram than 11.

Windows compresses RAM these days, not sure if Fedora does by default. Also, by itself Windows is surprisingly RAM efficient. I think it’s a holdover from Windows 8 which was developed for tablets when Microsoft tried competing with iPads.

The problems arise when web views like the news widget load. Then all the past optimizations no longer matter.

Also I don’t think KDE even uses more RAM than other DEs that are designed to be lightweight. Last time I compared, it used the same or less memory as LXDE.

Firefox without any website loaded uses more RAM than a full Plasma session.

XFCE is great for mid-range old devices, and LXQt is great for dogshit old devices.

What’s this device in your scale from old doghit to old mid-range?

Runs a full Plasma session just fine. The problem isn’t the desktop, it’s the web browsers, especially Firefox. Falkon runs OK.

You should expect to use the terminal . Period.

And I usually get downvoted when I say that Mint is not a user friendly distribution.

In essence it’s not much different than regular Linux distributions. There are some quirks related to pmOS being a derivative of Alpine Linux. It uses musl instead of glibc, so don’t expect meaningful NVidia support. Other than that, it’s regular kernel, regular Mesa. (Native package selection is much smaller than anything mainstream, Flatpak works, though.)

I couldn’t get a stable WiFi connection using WPA3 Personal. Not sure what the fault is. Switching the connection over to WPA2 in Plasma’s Network settings did the trick. This PC’s trackpad and touchscreen work absolutely fine but – and I think that’s how the hardware is designed and nothing to do with pmOS – the trackpad doesn’t show up as trackpad but as a mouse. So I cannot reconfigure it to use two finger scrolling. Scrolling is always on the left edge.

Websites claim that this PC supports bluetooth but the adapter doesn’t show. As I wrote in another comment, I suspect a hardware defect, given how abnormally unstable Windows 10 was. I need to get my hands on a USB Bluetooth dongle. I use my headphones via USB in the meantime which physically tethers me to the device but works fine.

There is a distribution made exactlt for low end computers that natively support it. Niche but not very extreme.

The hardware is on the ultra low end and mainstream distributions do not support it. Nobody but you talked about it being an “extreme niche”. You just made that up to distract from your claim that my setup is “Just a normal walk in the park” which clearly it is not.

How do I report self-harm on lemmy?

They way it ran Win10 was definitively infuriating. Firefox, too.

pmOS + Falkon is fine.

I’ve an old eeepc Ive been wanting to resurrect. Maybe I’ll try this on there.

Other than the installer wiping all the data, there is little to lose.

Mainstream distributions no longer support my setup, so it’s niche.

I didn’t read much about phones and ARM tablets but I got the impression it’s like flashing a custom Android ROM.

I think devices like the Framework 12 continue to be available but RAM and SSD costs won’t necessarily mean that lower end performance will not necessarily mean afforable, at least all the way through 2026.

pmOS / Alpine Linux is definitively a bit outside my comfort zone. The apk package manager is so weird with its add and del commands instead of install and remove everyone else uses.

It came with a factory reset version of Win10 but that ran so insanely bad, it kept crashing which to this degree isn’t normal even for Windows which is why I suspect faulty hardware.

The graphical installer is a it bare bones but easy to use. Setup is slow because in the background it generates a disk image of packages that are being downloaded and the write speed of my USB drive was a big bottle neck. Selection of native packages isn’t the greatest but pmOS comes with Flathub configured out of the box. (I’m usually a proponent of Flatpak but being so memory constrained, I refrain from the overhad of loading Flatpak runtimes into memory.