"These 2008-2010 era netbooks are impossible to use as a desktop."

I used one as a replacement for a "desktop computer" for 7+ years

Here, "desktop" means the form factor not the interface

I used NetBSD as the OS. I never tried to use Windows. It was during this time that I stopped using X11 entirely, i.e., no "desktop" metaphor, no terminal emulator programs, and began staying in VGA textmode 100% of the time

If I needed to view graphics I sent the files to another computer running graphical OS on the LAN but not connected to the internet. At the time, this was mainly an iPad

As a matter of practice I never connected Apple computers to the internet

These ASUS netbooks indeed had a slow processor but the amount I accomplished with this computer was substantial. I created bootable USB sticks that booted to rootfs in RAM and never touched disk, an immutable, custom OS that resembles ChromeOS today, but better (no Chrome or other software written and controlled by an adtrech corporation). I could pull out the stick after boot and use the USB port for something else.^1 NetBSD kernels compiled quickly enough and I did not use QEMU for testing

1. It was perplexing to me to read about the problems people had with SD cards when the RaspberryPi appeared. I pull the SD card out after boot, the OS runs entirely from RAM

I still have this netboook. There is some issue with the power. I have thought about trying to fix it

Another thing to keep in mind if you have an old netbook lying around is that a lot of the later models that came out after Windows 7 have PowerVR graphics (rebranded as "Intel GMA 3600") instead of the basic Intel chipset graphics. The only operating systems that will work with the GMA 3600 are 32-bit Windows 7 and whatever version of Fedora was current in 2012 (thanks to a closed source beta driver Intel released).

> A tip if you have one of those laying around and it always ran a 32-bit OS is to check if the CPU is really 32-bit only. Only the very first Atom generation was 32-bit, but the next generations had poor 64-bit driver support on Windows, so OEMs shipped it as a 32-bit machine. Not the case for OP’s netbook, theirs is really 32-bit only.

A lot of netbooks will lock the CPU into 32-bit mode in the BIOS, so getting them to boot a 64-bit OS also requires patching the BIOS. It's doable but has limited benefits when they're limited to 2-4 GB of RAM anyway.

> It had a weird 1024x600 display panel, and a lot of applications expect you to have at least 1024x768

On Debian at least, Alt+grab, or the window menu "move" could save your day.

There was also the scenario where the CPU was 64 bit but the EFI was 32 bit.

Booting a 32 bit OS was fine, but 64 bit OS' generally came with a 64 bit bootloader, so you had to do a special song and dance to load a 32 bit bootloader with a 64 bit OS.

I had a Toshiba NB305, which apparently had an Atom N450 (just looking at some old reviews, I don’t have it running anymore). It seemed fine for basic command line stuff and some web browsing (websites already had too much JavaScript at the time but at least you could usually get away with turning it off without losing any essential functionality).

It was by far my favorite laptop I’ve ever had. I put an SSD in it, though, which made a pretty huge difference.

After playing around with old spec hardware I would say before OP gives up try installing Alpine Linux.

Run Alpine Linux from RAM. That will consume about 125MB with the standard install. Set up persistence so you save changes. Install a lightweight window manager and use a lightweight browser like qutebrowser.

Even thought Alpine uses musl you can still get apps like Obsidian to run. I can't remember how though but this whole setup was usable on a PC that had a built in 56K modem.

Some those budget atom devices were also rather annoying for having only a 32 bit uefi despite a 64 bit cpu >4GB of ram. Could still boot into a 64 bit OS, just was a bit of a confusing hiccup you'll still see people running into from time to time.

The original ones that shipped Linux were fine. It was only when Microsoft started giving away XP to Netbook OEMs to kill the desktop Linux threat that things really went bad.

People talk about modern Microsoft and how much they do for open source have such short memories. Microsoft used to do everything they can to kill open source and even referred to the ecosystem as “communism”.

When you have a dialog window too big for the screen, you can Alt+Space to open the system menu, then activate the Move menu item, then you can use arrow keys to move the window around, even with the title bar out of bounds.

Not just for obsolete systems, sometimes a full screen application might pick a tiny desktop resolution as well, and not properly restore the resolution, so you could need to deal with a too-big dialog box in that situation as well.

The best possible use I can think of for one is disassembled and with just the screen and motherboard, running something like a full screen browser that auto refreshes a certain web page like the weather. With 1 gig of ram even the most minimal lxde or similar desktop environment is going to struggle to run a full size chromium or Firefox for anything more than one tab of browser content.

Or I suppose it could be treated like a CLI only info display panel running an ssh client and the "htop" output from a remote server.

> Sometimes apps would work fine until they opened a modal that was just a bit too tall, and you had to pray that Enter or Escape did something reasonable.

Do you mean that the titlebar would be off screen so you couldn't move/close the window?

https://xkcd.com/1479/

On the Xfce desktop at least there's a nice shortcut, alt+drag with left mouse button to move any window, and alt+drag with right mouse button to resize it. That's honestly the Linux thing I miss most when using any other OS.

> They were already painfully slow when they were new

Mostly, yes. I had an acer aspire one d250 (similar specs to that in the article) and i worked mostly okay under linux for light development work, meaning i was in high school doing java development with emacs and running apache ant by hand.

Other than that yeah they were painfully slow.

Also i bought a similar machine at a flea market for like 20€ and was sorely disappointed to find out it had a Broadcom wifi chip which is a pain to work with and i’m not really interested in buying an atheros card for another 20€.

HP mini there, with ZRAM it's really fast. I use Flubox+UXTerm+a bunch of CLI/TUI tools among mpv, nsxiv and mupdf. The OS I use it's hyperbola GNU/Linux, A bit outdated but most modern stuff it's compiled from source. For gaming I have mednafen, frotz, pcsxr, Flare RPG (git), GearHead 1 and 2 and a few more. Oh, and Scummvm with games from Blade Runner to Ultima I-IV, Technobabylon, Virtuaverse, The Longest Journey, Sierra and Lucas Arts games and about... ¿2000 games more?

For the web I use DIllo and a custom build of Otter Browser against the older QT5 Webkit engine.

For web media I use streamlink and yt-dlp.