[creshal]

OP first needs to decide what the actual problem is they want to solve.

> Either they are filled with bugs, refuse to install on my computer's hard drive, require too much RAM, run too slowly, lack important drivers or codecs, are no longer actively supported, do not support 32-bit CPU's, are too difficult for novices to use, or have other highly-annoying problems like, for example, poor use of swap space.

Most of these problems could be tackled without having to invent a whole new distribution – bugs can be fixed, swap usage can be tuned, drivers can be packaged and added, etc. Any of these, apparently, would make one or several currently borderline useful distribution into a fully usable one.

Or maybe not, going by OP's other blog posts (e.g. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/surf-internet.html) they're proud of not understanding how Linux distributions work. ("the same number of bugs as the average Linux distribution"?!, Complaining that lightweight distributions don't have as many preinstalled programs as big ones, dpkg -i'ing random packages designed for other distributions, …)

[mrweasel]

The article about surfing the internet on an old machine made me look up the SlimJet browser mentioned. The SlimJet website (https://www.slimjet.com/) is either extremely funny, or extremely suspicious. It has an late 90' early 2000' vibe going on.

[anthk]

>I also found that I was able to play 480p Youtube videos in full-screen mode and listen to music on Pandora.

Holy shit, he/she is very uninformed. Pandora plays perfectly with some CLI player (I can't remember it's name), and for youtube damn mpv with youtube-dl (my config for my trash machine) will play any 720p video fast as hell.

~/.config/mpv/config:

    vo=gpu,drm
    sws-fast=yes
    sws-allow-zimg=no
    zimg-dither=no
    vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all

[amiga-workbench]

Yup, I've got mpv playing back 720p youtube on a 1.8Ghz Pentium M machine with no trouble at all.

The real issue I'm having is that with all the old 2D graphics acceleration API's being deprecated in X11, you are stuck with Glamor to accelerate desktop compositing, and that only works if you have a later fixed function GPU, or a modern programmable GPU. If you're stuck with an old ATI FireGL like I am, X11 will vomit an error about the GPU not having enough instruction slots to do the job.

Its kind of baffling, the hardware is capable enough to run Half Life 2, but it can't composite a few windows? I'm almost tempted to go compile X11 myself and remove that particular check.

[anthk]

Disable Glamor and enable EXA rendering. My 10-radeon.conf:

    Section "OutputClass"
       Identifier "Radeon"
 MatchDriver "radeon"
 Driver "radeon"
 Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
 Option "EXAVSync" "false"
 Option "SwapbuffersWait" "false"
    EndSection

My GPU: AMD RS690M [Radeon Xpress 1200/1250/1270]

[luke2m]

Not a CLI, but Pithos [0] works great. [0] https://pithos.github.io/

[anthk]

Now I remember: pianobar.

[kodah]

> poor use of swap space

Swap is configured by the user. You do need to know what you're doing in order to configure it to your usecase.