I had installed Debian on an Acer Aspire One Laptop. It has a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU with just 1GB of RAM. I obviously can’t run it like a usual desktop anymore, it’s way too slow.
I tried it to connect it to my TV with HDMI to create some sort of “Smart TV” setup, but that didn’t work out because I can’t even play 1080p videos on VLC with it smoothly.
So… What now? Can I only use it for headless stuff like pihole, nextcloud, etc. now?
Is there any hope left for my unsuccessful “Smart TV” contraption?
Honestly, ewaste center.
Not much an atom with a gig of ram can do.
@slazer2au @maliciousonion it can play music, do IRC, Jabber, vim (neovim even, if you’re lucky). there are even TUI rendering programs for Markdown and EPUB formats
I’m using my old netbook as Pi-hole and some home server stuff. Does its job.
You can get an old Raspberry Pi very cheap, i have a 2b but you can go even lower. It’s probably a better idea to spend a few bucks and install DietPi with Pihole on it. It uses only 5 watts, your laptop takes probably ten times more.
Btw videos not working well because of absense of hardware decoding codecs, and it is make software decoding.
Since it’s an old acer netbook with an Intel atom cpu it is highly unlikely it has any hardware decoding built in.
In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don’t know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.
Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.
