Papamousse

At least if you want to play with it in XP, install mypal browser https://www.mypal-browser.org/ I have had success with it on a XP machine, it loads facebook, reddit, lemmy.world, etc.

For an old distro, have you tried AntiX 32 bits?

In Canada it’s tap to pay for ~8 years now, never saw a QR code to pay. However when I go in USA, every stores is tap to pay, except one, there’s one store in USA where there is no tap, it’s Walmart, inconcevable.

Few years old Dell laptop, they are incredible, even easy to open and repair, parts available everywhere, BIOS update even after 5 or 6 years.

You can buy a few years old Latitude for maybe $200, 14", i5 8th gen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, wifi, bt, webcam, usb-c, name it.

Being 8th gen it runs win11, but they also run Linux pretty well, I’m running MX Linux (debian based) on them and everything is supported.

example https://www.ebay.ca/itm/115672158079

Well, on MX I’m using “MX Live USB Maker” which can flash any ISO on thumb drive, it’s a built-in tool.

Now I’m using Ventoy, you just put multiple ISO on the thumb drive and choose it when you boot the USB drive, it’s wonderful, no more “1 OS per drive”, you just take a 32GB USB drive and you can put 10 distro on it.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/screenshot.html

There’s even a MX release for Pi https://mxlinux.org/download-links/

CP/M, GCOS, DOS, Windows, BeOS, Debian a few years, Ubuntu (a lotttttt of years), Mint (~3 years), MX (6 years now).

I played/installed with a couple of distro like Mandrake, LFS, CentOS, Arch, etc and basically all distro in the 90s were a bunch of floppies for the kernel and gnu utils, a bunch for X, that we downloaded from university usenet.

LFS was nightmarish, so is Arch a little bit when you install everything from basically scratch, now I prefer something that is working fine, MX AHS is a really good distro.

I also always prefered simple window system, coming from mwm/twm. Cinnamon was pretty but in the end I hated it, Xfce is my DE of choice now.

S0idle is a real problem.

Years ago you put your laptop in sleep S3 mode at 5PM, put in the backpack, resume it at 9AM the next morning and it lost maybe 10% battery.

Now S0idle is like a cellphone, always powered, so you put your laptop in a backpack, windows/Linux half support a botched S0 so some devices are still powered, either your laptop overheat or dies because battery reach 0% during the night.

Sleep in RAM, meaning only the ram is powered/refreshed, everything else like cpu or SSD are unpowered.

TotalCommander.

I was using Norton Commander in DOS in the 90s, then WindowsCommander in Windows 3, which was renamed TotalCommander. Using this for maybe 35 years. I don’t know how to use Windows gui to copy/paste or explore multiple folders etc.

I’m out of the loop but why do I see this guy (nascar driver?) in meme lastly?

oh yes, virtualdub, ffmpeg, all the codec and their option, containers, etc, it was an art

Remember goatse.cx ?

I don’t really care, for me “linux” is a kernel, a bunch of gnu utilities, and I take Xfce as desktop. I can use firefox? an editor? cmake? gcc? I’m in business.

All distros are the same. The main diff is apt/yum/pacman/etc. to distribute packages.

yes Debian, install latest MX Linux (23.2 AHS) and enjoy it, it’s a great distro, up to date, well maintained. There is a KDE version where you can install latest kernel from their AHS repo (6.6.11 as time of writing)

Yep, I’m using ctrl-c and q and s and d and z etc for almost 40 years now, it would be difficult to change those habits

On mine it was playing with some /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-4/power/wakeup or something, (use the right device number from lsusb), also there is some settings in the BIOS to power or not USB when sleeping, obviously if some USB port have no power, wakeup cannot work :) Every setup/BIOS is kinda different though.

And I have had the same problem as OP with just knocking the desk and the computer wakes up and it is annoying!

My latest trackball I switched it to Bluetooth mode so when PC is sleeping, no BT at all.

Yes, this is why you should use DNS over TLS. My router signal to every DHCP client that it is the DNS resolver, and internally use DoT/dnssec to query IPs. It also intercepts every request on DNS port in case of some DNS are hard-coded on some devices.

Reboot your router/DHCP server

Ubuntu is Debian anyway. Why not installing MX (based on Debian too) with XFCE, it is the best experience I have had.

I come from good old LFS from the 90s and for me, a distro is just a kernel with some GNU utils, a window manager, and a way to get packages (which is about the only diff between “distro”)

nice one :)