I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I’m thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?
In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.
I am on Debian 12, and tried all these 4 DEs before coming back to GNOME. Since you sound adept at LXQt, can you recommend me something better than that weird network connection manager GUI that LXQt comes with? I found it extremely bad compared to what XFCE comes with, or the extremely easy ones with GNOME and KDE. It should not take 20 seconds to find and connect to a WiFi.