The original post: /r/linux by /u/MrGoose48 on 2025-03-12 23:41:34.
(This post is to elaborate the face lift of an old HP stream; neofetch image posted for reference)
My first laptop, this little HP stream, I was so happy to get when I was around 8 years old.
specs:
Celeron N3060
4 Gigs of ram
32 gigs of EMMC storage
Yeah… It was already terrible when it was released, and as I progressed into the computer hobby it dawned on me how terrible this laptop was. It was slow, loading up browsers took an agonizingly long time, and trying to play even IO games was sluggish. I eventually ditched this laptop in favor for an upgrade and bought a dell XPS 13 7390, and having both a real nvme and more than 2 cores, it was blazing fast, leaving this laptop to quickly be forgotten on my dusty bookshelf.
This later changed when I was cleaning out and saw it sitting on the shelf. Powered it on with a charger, and saw that it still in fact works. Earlier this year, my first distro, Fedora, had been more than pleasant and seen how easy Linux was to install and use, so I decided that even though it was definitely lighter than windows, I might as well look around for a lighter OS. Lubuntu on paper seemed great. It was most importantly extremely cut down out of the box, simplistic (albeit basic, LXQT is fine) UI, and was in the ubuntu camp, which would be great for a noob user.
Boot times? halved. load times? halved. just browsing still felt like jello, but after I updated it and I played around, this could successfully play back 1440p youtube (4k saw some dropped frames) and having more than 3-4 tabs wouldn’t cause the system to keel over and have a heart attack. definitely wasn’t a super pretty DE, but literally being able to actually browse instead of waiting an additional 8 seconds for reddit to load was crazy to me.
Right now, my hardware has gone way beyond the pathetic celeron (7600x/7900GRE rig), and I will continue to dual boot (or even triple boot) as time goes on, but gone are the pessimistic days of looking down on Linux, and now I even just default to considering it as a way to breathe life into my old hardware.