Personal Blogs
Life always moves from complexity to simplicity. Which also means that when things are simple, they are better and optimized.
Some time back I wrote an article about how Archlinux saved good old Ubuntu that was running on my old desktop. Things went fine for some time but whenever new packages were required I was forced to compile from the source and then install it. This was because Ubuntu has stopped maintaining repo for the Ubuntu version I was running.
With a 12 years old computer my obvious choice was not any off-the-shelf distro but Archlinux. Archlinux because it is designed with the KISS concept in the center.
The machine has following specification
The system is now fully configured and it runs Archlinux and it works much better than old ubuntu. I could not get gnome up due to space crunch and also it would have ended-up eating all of the memory available. Xfce was an obvious choice. Following are super lightweight applications that run on my desktop and perform all my computation tasks. Note it only uses 7 GB of HD space.
In short, my 12 year old machine helps me browse through the Internet, check emails, blogs, youtube, ted.com, chess.com, download multimedia and play them locally, manage my presentations/documents, bookkeeping/accounting.