TDE’s CDE window decoration style pretty much matches the screenshot. There’s also a matching widget style (Motif). I’d guess that the icon set exists Somewhere Out There On The Internet. So you can get this look if you want it badly enough to install a non-default DE that’s currently limited to X11.
LXQt, XFCE, Maté, TDE. Any of them will do. Which you choose depends on personal preference and how large an ecosystem you want—LXQt has only a few basic applications, TDE has pretty much everything that was in KDE3, the others are somewhere in between.
Generic distro kernel? You shouldn’t have any problems.
Hand-compiled kernel cooked up with -march=native? You’re sticking with AMD, so there should still be no issues unless some instruction got dropped between the old CPU and the new, which almost never happens. You might have to add a kernel module or two for things built into your mobo, nothing serious.
(Hell, I had a Windows 2000 install on a multi-boot system survive an upgrade like that, once upon a time. Just booted perfectly happily on the new hardware.)
As far as I’m concerned, everything goes under /mnt , and has for the past 18+ years.
“WM8650” seems to indicate a VIA WonderMedia WM8650 armv5te chipset, used by a lot of anemic Android laptops circa 2011 (sold under various brandnames, but apparently all made in the same factory). People have installed Linux on them in the past (there seems to have been a fad for Arch on these for a while, given the search results), but you might have trouble getting a device tree that will work with a modern kernel.
Honestly, though, it has less processor than a Raspberry Pi 3. Unless you’ve already thought of a specific use for this, I’d dump it back in the junk drawer.
The Gentoo news post is not about having /bin and /usr/bin as separate directories, which continues to work well to this day (I should know, since that’s the setup I have). That configuration is still supported.
The cited post is about having /bin and /usr on separate partitions without using an iniramfs, which is no longer guaranteed to work and had already been awfully iffy for a while before January. Basically, Gentoo is no longer jumping through hoops to make sure that certain files land outside /usr, because it was an awful lot of work to support a very rare configuration.
Looks like mid-to-high-level difficulty if you really want to build from source, due to multiple complex interdependent configuration flags that have to match your hardware, and the need to check a kernel option or two. (Based on the Gentoo ebuild for mesa 24.1.2).
Ships with Gentoo by default, since you actually need a nongraphical editor there and nano is easier to learn than vi or emacs.
They’re unlikely to do worse than my laptop from 2008, and it’s perfectly usable under Linux (bit of a lag when starting up large programs, that’s all). As has already been said, go for a lighter desktop environment (XFCE, LXQT, Mate, TDE) unless these machines were high-spec’d for their era. For the oldest machines, you might want to consider installing Puppy Linux rather than one of the more mainstream distributions, since Puppy specializes in old x86-family hardware.
Some of them throw up their hands and reinstall at the first sign of a problem. The rest get someone else to do the “hard” part for them, in my experience. They hand it over to the Unofficial Repair Person Paid in Beer and Pizza, who does the command-line stuff, registry editing, etc. Or they get an official repair person. Less than 10% of the Windows-using population does their own fixes.
Gentoo’s benefits come from having software specifically compiled for your specific CPU, which can take advantage of its quirks. Technically that’s achievable with other distros as well; it’s just a lot more work when it isn’t built into your package manager. You can also eke out additional performance by building a custom kernel and removing various features that are meant to protect against bugs or security concerns, and while Gentoo doesn’t push custom kernels as hard as it did twenty years ago, the capability is still readily accessible.
So: Gentoo makes it easier to access methods than can in theory be used to speed up any distro. The gains are either quite modest (for custom compilation) or not necessarily that good a tradeoff (disabling Spectre mitigations and other protections in the kernel). 🤷
(Yes, I wrote a serious response to a joke post. Bite me.)
One thing no one seems to have touched on yet: distros have philosophies—guiding principles that affect what packages they have and how they’re presented.
For instance, Debian is strongly open-source-centric. Closed-source software is not normally found in their main repository (even when it would be useful to put it there, like some drivers).
Gentoo, on the other hand, is all about user choice. You’re expected to choose for yourself whether you want to use systemd or OpenRC, X or Wayland, which DE (if any) you want to use, and which features you do or don’t want compiled into your software. However, Gentoo is quite happy to include closed-source software in the main package repository, because using it is also a choice that some people prefer to make.
Red Hat, Arch, and Slackware (to name the remaining major foundational distros) also have their own philosophies. Some descendant distros retain their parents’ principles, while others discard them and develop a philosophy of their own (Ubuntu doesn’t have Debian’s Open Source Uber Alles tendencies, for instance).
I prefer mplayer—novel-length man page and all—for video, but there’s nothing innately wrong with VLC. I did try it, a very long time ago, but it felt too GUI-oriented for my taste back then.
(I can think of exactly two times mplayer has failled to play a file I presented it with, and in both cases it was my own fault for not compiling in support for that codec. However, the man page is justifiably frightening.)
I have a laptop of that era (2008 HP Pavilion, Athlon64x2, 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD). It runs the Trinity Desktop Environment, which works just as well now as it did when that laptop was a flagship machine. (Updating a Gentoo system running on a machine that old is a bit time-consuming, mind you, but that isn’t the DE’s fault.)
I’ve tried several of the other lighter-weight DEs—XFCE, LXDE, Lumina, Gnome2 before it became MATE—but TDE does what I need it to do, and (just as importantly) the development team prefers to work on features and compatibility rather than tearing out things that still work or forcing new paradigms that don’t really make sense for my use case onto me. It’s there, it’s solid, and I’ve already learned its quirks, so I can save my brain cells for learning useful features in other programs rather than having to figure out where the control for some bit of the GUI ran off to this time. Why would I use anything else? The thing I want most from my DE is for it to stay out of the way and not keep me from using other software.
(Plus, Konqueror may no longer be useful as a web browser, but it’s still a better file manager than, say, Thunar, which I found to be a pain in the arse when I tried XFCE.)
Rolling-release Linux distros such as Arch, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed constantly release the latest updates, but they’re not used in businesses.
So some businesses decided that monolithic releases were more important than being able to get the latest upstream vanilla kernel version, and somehow that’s the fault of “all Linux kernel vendors” (including rolling-release distros, since there was no attempt to qualify “all”) and not the businesses’ decisions about tradeoffs?
Delete all the code. Then you’ll have no bugs.
should still already choose their sexuality
Sexuality is not a choice, any more than your skin colour is a choice.
To echo others here, you really need to kill the driver. There are a couple of different kernel modules that might be involved, depending on exactly how your touch panel is connected to the rest of the system. Software that has no specific touch support will likely treat your renegade hardware as a mouse, rather than ignoring it.
You may be able to unbind the driver from the device, see this discussion on stackexchange.
Dude. I actually have sources for most of my installed packages lying around, because Gentoo. Do you know how much space that source code takes up?
Just under 70GB. And pretty much everything but maybe the 10GB of direct git pulls is compressed, one way or another.
That means that even if your distro is big and has 100 people on development, they would each have to read 1GB or more of decompressed source just to cover the subset of packages installed on my system.
How fast do you read?
I think that’s the old locolor icon theme. The version I have around is modified for TDE, but the original should exist somewhere out there (if OpenSUSE is still offering KDE3, then they probably have it).