I have an old Asus EeePC 1015T netbook with an HDMI (and VGA) output, a screen that glitches if I'm holding it wrong, a huge, tired, unreliable battery, a noisy fan that fails to cool it to less than skin-burning temperatures, and slightly less than 1 GB of RAM. I've seen Xubuntu, then Lubuntu, become slowly unusable on it; I've tried to install Arch then Sway, but although the device got kinda less sluggish, the leaning curve for a tiling window manager was still too high.

So here's a thought experiment: could I craft a Linux setup with a themeable yet cohesive Windows 98-like UI, that I can plug to an old monitor (1280x1024 should be enough) and that can be just responsive enough to do basic, focused tasks (writing, listening to music and webradios, browsing Wikipedia, perhaps playing Doom) using this kind of very limited hardware? The idea would be to have some sort of reliability: instead of installing an old distro and freezing all updates, I'd ideally go for a modern basis that I can upgrade without worrying of watching my setup collapsing on itself; so I could reproduce this setup on other, similarly old computers, and turn them into retro distraction-free appliances where you could chill with a classic Windows feel and Winamp themes.

I have some ideas but I'm not sure about the best approach. I've tried an immutable Fedora image (Blue95), but after a full day and night of waiting for the setup and rebase to complete, the end result was way too slow to be usable. Then I went for BunsenLabs on a Debian Trixie basis: it works okay performance-wise, but there's a lot of obscure menu items pointing to small apps to customize (you have to know what a "conky" or a "tint2" is, and also understand that the default panel is a third different thing). I'm thinking of trying postmarketOS, since the Alpine base sounds lightweight enough, but I havent figured out how to install it on my EeePC.

Could Wayland be possible with these hardware limitations? If so, how should I setup it? I guess labwc (pictured above) is the best fit for a Win9x experience, but what is needed afterwards? LXQt or Xfce or something else?

I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Hey I was trying to set up archipelago to run a Chrono Trigger - Jets of Time randomizer file, and it needs a lua script to run to connect to archipelago. I couldn’t find a single SNES emulator with lua scripting enabled such as SNES9x-rr on windows. I tried just running that through proton but the lua scripts would not function. New to Linux so idk much on compiling shit natively or if I would need dependencies or to add something to wine/proton for lua to work or if there is an app image or something already that I could easily install that I didn’t see with a quick search.

update: Okay, seems maybe with proton can get stuff running but the lua won't work. Seems I can get it to try and run it, but runs into some issue with a .dll and not being able to find "main" or whatever. Can't find any flatpack/appimg for a native emulator with a lua injector, and idk if I can install cuz sudo apt doesn't work on it and idk enough to figure out how I'm supposed to get and compile shit. Soooo, heck.

Edit: forgot to mention incase it matters, running Bazzite 42.