Would they bother going back to add support for 10+ years old hardware though? Cool if they did but I doubt it.

Speaking of finicky- just after my post, I tried switching back to the dedicated GPU with the Optimus app, at which point the graphics drivers broke completely, necessitating booting into the grub menu, opening the root terminal and deleting the nvidia drivers. Good thing I made a snapshot just before I started messing with graphics card switching

I think I'll leave the GPU situation as is for now, but I'll keep your recommendation in mind when I start tinkering with it again.

I'll be trying version 21.3 of Mint instead of 22 next and see if I can get more use out of my GPU with that, so fingers crossed. I'm not expecting incredible gaming performance or anything but I would prefer my GPU not completely gimped.

It seems this is specifically an Nvidia problem. The open source drivers for AMD cards are apparently great but since Nvidia are a bunch of dicks the community has been left to reverse engineer what they can. At least there is an option to keep old hardware going.

I'm going to install the last version of Mint 21 that had those Nvidia drivers or Anti-X to see if they're at least better than Nouveau. Much respect to the community for trying to keep Nvidia's old cards running despite Nvidia's best efforts to consign them to the e-waste bin, but I would like to be able to do stuff that worked on Windows.

Like I remembered, no mention of Optimus or any other GPU options in the BIOS.

You should have seen the custom color schemes I used to make on classic Windows when I was a kid, this is nothing

I would've preferred something a bit more subtle, but that was the only truly red option that came up in the theme downloader so that's what I went with, since the accent color picker simply didn't satisfy my thirst for the color red

I need a red taskbar and title bars at minimum

I'll take a look in the BIOS when I boot next time. Nvidia Optimus doesn't ring any bells so I don't believe I've ever touched it in the decade+ I've had the laptop.

Windows did at least sort of recognize them, at least enough to say they needed to be formatted, right? Reminds me of when I insert USB drives with live Linux installations, Windows does the same to Linux-specific partitions.

This'd be much easier to get to the bottom of if I had spare cards lying around. I'd love to see if Windows could use them after formatting

How's DualShock 4 compatibility with Linux? On Windows I use DS4Windows to use it with emulators and non-Steam games, and while Steam does have DS4 support I enjoyed having different profiles with DS4Windows for different applications.

That'd be good news for my desktop. Really hate that I'll be forced to upgrade to 11 on it.

Anti-X comes with several workarounds to watch Youtube videos but they get regularly broken by changes to Youtube :google-cool:

Like I said, I mainly picked Anti-X for my old WinXP laptop because it had great compatibility with really old systems. That said, I did actually manage to get kind of used to it. From what I tried, Mint definitely seems more slick, modern and user-friendly though and I'll be trying that out on the Win10 laptop.

But the battery life is going to suck shit

Don't worry, the battery is already so busted I have the laptop always plugged in. It will seriously last about 5 minutes I'd get a new one but they're kind of expensive and I don't really need to use it on the train, etc anyway.

I guess that answers my question about live USBs. I'm fine with fiddling with those- an Anti-X live USB has come handy when fixing problems with my Windows desktop

I don't use the old WinXP install on the ancient laptop too often but dual booting seems to work fine on that machine. Seems like Microsoft has innovated since then

Windows 7 but modernized and customizable

Please tell me I can customize accent colors as I never got color customization to work with Anti-X- I like my operating systems brightly colored. Can I make a live USB with Mint like you can with Anti-X? It would make it easier to try it out before committing to an install.

Ubuntu and Mint seem to be the most commonly recommended ones for newcomers.

I would do a dual boot setup like on the WinXP machine, but the HDD I've got in this laptop is slow and already mostly eaten up by the Windows installation, and I'd rather not get an unnecessarily large SSD just to also fit the ailing old Windows install. I was thinking I'll just chuck the old HDD in a closet and use a USB SATA adapter to get files from it if need arises. Besides, I already have Windows on the desktop that is my current daily driver so I'm open to just embracing the Linux life on this laptop.

This laptop does actually have an SD card slot. The funny thing is that until I took it apart last year to do a deep clean and apply new thermal paste I never noticed it had one- I got this thing second hand and the person I got it from never told me. I suppose I might as well finally try to get some use out of it. I assume I'm limited to 32GB SDHC cards at most though, given the age of this laptop.

I'm pretty sure the base is okay. It is, however, a budget chair- a budget gamer chair. I have some old broken office chairs that I've kept around (the backs and arm rests fell off because they were cheap plastic, the seats and bases are fine. I'll check if the pistons are interchangeable