I was on the hunt for a cheap laptop that was small. Did not need the best laptop ever just needed something that was not that big so it can be portable. Was looking at a chromebook and it was cheap enough but the problem was that it only had 16gb of storaage and that might be fine but it would be better to have more storage. So what I ended up going with is a $50 Acer netbook I found on ebay. It was the Acer aspire AOD255 model. Not the most powerful computer even at the time but its not the worst laptop ever. A pro about this laptop is that I can just install any linux distro with no issue since its just a normal x86 windows computer. So I went and downloaded openbsd to put on this computer. To do the install I plugged in ethernet and then when I was done with the install I connected to wifi. The wifi was supported in openbsd but the connection was getting disconnected every so often. The only way to fix it was to run some command to bring it back up but that is not a good solution. Could not find a fix no matter what I did. Just don’t have to use openbsd not a big deal. So then went with netbsd. It was all great but I was on 9.2 and 9.3 came out. Put the installer onto a usb stick and tired to boot it but it keept restarting before going into the installer. Netbsd 9.2 was fine but 9.3 did not work. Had to boot into the installer so I could select the upgrade option so upgrade my instaall but it did not work. Then I tried to mount my usb stick that was formated exfat (i know I can change the file system) and it did not work. After that I went with freebsd but I lasted one day on it and switched to void linux musl right after.

I really like Void linux and been running it on my Acer apsire 7720 for awhile now. Even ran it on my main pc at some point and there is a screenshot on my mastodon account somwhere. Never had any issue where Void could not update correctly. Even if I waited a month to update it will still update just fine. Its one of the lighest linux distro there is. Void is a source distro so there is no compiling things unlike when using a source distro like Gentoo. There are many other advantages to using Void and its great. The boot time on the Acer netbook with Void musl is about 30 secconds. The laptop has a HDD and it boots in 30 secconds That is crazy. The laptop is not the fastest and if I load badwolf with javascript then it gets very slow till it ends up crashing. Not so great but it does do most things that are lightweight just fine.

Right now I can play music through mpv and when I get it setup cmus. Badwolf without javascript works just fine. Not the fastest but not that bad. I can do anything through the cli because most cli things are very light. I can also type and publish this blog post right from this laptop. I am writing this blog post and I am not even home (i don’t have internet connection to publish it). The laptop does get somewhat hot on the left side but its not that bad. The keyboard is not the worst. I can controll my volume and brightness right from the keyboard controlls. The size is really nice for bringing the laptop places and its cheap enough I can replace it if I need to. I am happy with the laptop and think it was a good buy.

this is post 12 of 100 days to offload