I've been trying to get an older Toshiba laptop to work for basic web browsing and document editing for my relative and ended up using FydeOS (Chrome OS based).
My relative is not at all tech savvy and pretty much only knows the bare minimum to navigate a computer so it had to be user friendly and modern in UI design.
I started with NixOS and KDE Plasma because its easy to configure. For them, the UI was unfamiliar in the sense that they were expecting Windows icons, etc. I filled up the desktop, renamed Libreoffice to Word, used a Windows icon pack, installed Chromium. Seemed good! It almost worked, but then there was some issue with the WiFi for them which made browsing slow, the experience took a few seconds for loading anything. The main problem was slow internet. The laptops running a Pentium, 5gb RAM, and an HDD. I could've debugged it but had heard of FydeOS being a really nice way to revive old laptops to some level of usability without needing ChromeOS with a Google account. I got FydeOS v19 for Intel legacy, installed it, with an expectation it'd run as fast as NixOS+KDE. But to my surprise it was smoother! Idk what black magic they had done. The main usecase of just browsing was snappy, WiFi worked fine. Although there didn't seem to be much user choice for offline apps. I got the Linux and Android subsystems enabled and installed the latest Libreoffice. I'm somewhat hopeful this will fit the needs of my relative! Although the whole complication of Linux files vs main filesystem may be confusing for them but it can be dealt with I think. Time will tell. I'm glad this worked because otherwise they were gonna buy a whole new laptop for just basic use when there was a capable enough system right here.
#linux #laptop #fydeos #chromeos
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