Resource Management - Knocking the Dust Off

One man's trash...

As long as I can remember, my family has always had a knack for taking care of our electronics. We rarely have to upgrade devices, systems run well, and screens are clear of all dust and fingerprints. However, with the growing bloatware that Windows installs by default (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Edge), the older devices just cannot keep up like they used to. Thanks to open source distributions and years of support and documentation though, old tech can be revived and run even faster than before.

I began this personal project as soon as I heard my mother say, "I need a new laptop, this one is way too slow." I was elated to hear the news, and even more excited when she agreed to provide me the hardware for this endeavor.

Picking a Winning Distribution

I went down the rabbit hole of researching which distribution I wanted to use for this old laptop, and was honestly overwhelmed at the sheer number of options. Did I want Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, NixOS, Manjaro... I couldn't really decide. It was only after I came across a reddit post regarding the ability to rice Linux and customize it to the exact setting that I finally landed on using Arch as the distribution of choice. It has long term support, access to the Arch User Repository (AUR), and is lightweight enough to not overpower the limited hardware.

Installation

Haha... no. I am not going to list install instructions for this distro because the documentation online is truly endless. However, I will explain a few struggles I had along the way. I used the archinstall script, as it streamlines the process of spinning up the OS. With this being my first time, I knew there had to be a way to connect to the internet so the necessary packages could be installed. I had a slight bit of trouble, but I eventually found the proper commands for the iwctl utility to set up Wi-Fi. Turns out there is a special flag for a hidden network! After that small hiccup though, I was able to continue with the install as planned.

ML4W

I planned to work with all the Arch settings in due time, so I wanted a distro that already had a bit of ricing done so I could focus more on switching to Linux as a daily driver. I came across a content creator and talented individual names Stephan Raabe who crafted dotfiles and an install script for his My Linux 4 Work (ML4W) project. It comes complete as a Hyprland install with waybar, custom themes, colorized terminals, and plenty of HD wallpapers. I liked what I saw, so I figured these dotfiles would suffice and scratch that customization itch for a while.

Applications

The only other hiccup I encountered was ensuring I had all my necessary applications installed on the machine like Obsidian, VirtualBox, OnlyOffice, Brave, and a few other key items for my day to day. Sometimes the AUR worked, sometimes I had to install extra dependencies, and sometimes I needed installation files from the official websites. Ultimately, I was able to configure the workstation exactly as planned and recreate what I normally ran on Windows.

Performance

The performance is nothing short of phenomenal. I ran a disk usage command, and the total disk utilization went down by about 37%. That was just from switching over from Windows! As old as this hardware was, Arch Linux truly revitalized the life of this machine and created a very versatile workstation from an aged piece of technology that almost ended up as trash.

Moving Forward

This project only fueled my creative mindset for reporposing old technology. Every computer I can get my hands on has a project just waiting to be installed and fleshed out in my network. Aside from getting hands on learning through installation of drives and components, provisioning these machines with a purpose is super exciting and fulfilling. My biggest takeaway is that you never really know if it works unless you do it, so I dove right in and tackled the challenge with ease. I already provisioned another work laptop, and have a retired workstation from an old job that will be getting its turn very shortly. Self-hosted Cloud? Private LLM? Honeypot for security analysis? We'll have to see what the future has in store!