@wyatt
The accelerator and clone market is still the first thing to pop into my head whenever I think of the Amiga, as many of the big games (i.e Turrican, Cannon Fodder) found their way onto on other platforms.

Dad was an Atari ST guy: at least in the sense that it was the computer he owned after the Taiwanese Apple II replica, but before getting conscripted into the PC Clone Army.

@wyatt
Pretty much the only reason that I would get a computer in that ballpark (or higher) would be to emulate PS3 and Xbox 360 exclusives* or build lots of software from scratch: I'd rather build an overkill 21st century luggable than buy a RAM-starved PowerMac that can't run Mac OS or a viable Linux or BSD.

*the games with PC ports may run well on "desktop replacement" laptops exactly old enough to have Windows 98 drivers.
That kind of flexibility is why I'd be more okay with a hoard of old computers than a hoard of home videogame consoles.

@wyatt
To each their own, there are many ways to skin a cat, etc.
Let's leave this thread be.

@wyatt
>Librewolf
>DRD Team has LZDoom (GZDoom lite) and Slade3 (fancy Doom editor)
>Debian Multimedia has a YT-DLP that can actually connect to Youtube
Can live without these specific packages on a secondary machine: first two projects only offer AMD64 and ARM64 anyway.

Any excuse to do Seamonkey again is probably a good excuse (Albatross would be a far better name for a big internet suite TBH).

@wyatt
>3rd party repositories?
I don't use external repos that often, but the ability to easily find binaries that aren't part of The Mothership and where the official release is a Flatpak (urk) or Appimage (not perfect either, but has doesn't explicity demand a runtime/sandbox/updater contraption and has some uptake in the 32bit scene) is pretty reassuring.
It's one the reasons I've stuck with Debian: though I can see myself building certain software from scratch for the sake of optimizations.

As for the NetBSD situation: if I'm gonna use some lesser-known distro with an equally unpopular package format I might as well using the OS that still supports Motorola 68000 machines.

@wyatt GPU failures were particularily common on the T41, if the Thinkpad forums are anything to go by.
I heard the T43 fixed it for good.

Got a T42 because it's supposed to have sturdier Win98 support and because I could find one for fairly cheap. (Radeon 7500 Mobility seems to be the earliest laptop GPU that isn't a total disappointment for 3D games).

While I'm at it: is Linux still a viable option on Pentium M devices (software support, device drivers, third-party package repositories), or should I go straight for NetBSD?

@wyatt
>The generation where the mobo is apparently thin enough that you can pop off the GPU by holding the case "wrong" (as in: one-handed).

@rgegriff The window managers (I've mainly used XFCE and KDE) have a lot of nifty features: stuff that could've been implemented during Windows 8 if it was designed by the Powertoys and Sysinternals people instead of a coked-up touchscreen salesman.

The Metro environment worked kinda well on tablets, but I'm still shocked that Microsoft completely ignored the ramifications of forcing a half-baked parallel ecosystem of fullscreen-only applications onto every desktop, and replacing the startmenu with a fullscreen version.

My dad still gets fired up when reminded of the Windows RT situation: MS ported the entire OS to energy efficient ARM systems only to ban them from running any desktop software beyond Office and the mediocre pack-in stuff (because they didn't allow desktop apps on the Windows Store).

The Copilot push is arguably less agressive, in the sense that it seems to be sequestered to action buttons in applications, along with the telemetry/spyware/adware that's been active by default since 10.

@evv42 @domi I'd consider buying one of those super simple eDP to DP breakout boards (brightness controlled by holding the power button, rather than digging through some godforsaken OSD) and pairing it with an appropriately sized 16:10 gaming laptop panel.

Have already done the same thing with a 2560x1440 panel (the same type that people use to max out their T420/T430 laptops) in a wooden case.

@wyatt Do you have anything nice to say about the "low-spec Linux distro for GUI people"-scene, or do you suggest that everyone just picks up a more generalist distro/OS and learns to configure away the bloated bits?

Have personally had a lot of success with MX Linux: even if it's just Debian with a suite of GUI tools (i.e theming, package management, making LiveUSBs of the running system, installing proprietary Nvidia drivers when Noveau doesn't cut it), official support for sysvinit and occasional warts that don't show up in the source material (i.e lock screen not working out of the box in the XFCE ISO).

Puppy Linux and Tiny Core have some interesting-sounding features, but dual-core Ivy Bridge laptops aren't crappy enough to justify running everything as root or using an obscure esoteric package manager (respectively).
If I'm gonna step that far out of my comfort zone I'd rather go all-out and try NetBSD.

@wyatt Not sure if this is Amiga Accelerator madness or if it's just something that comes pre-baked into every moderately fancy OEM charger.

@eloy They call it Windows 7 Enterprise, but it doesn't even remotely resemble LCARS.

@elly Alternate timeline where Steve Ballmer is still Microslag CEO and constantly hollers about the miracle of prompt engineering or whatever.