Hi! I'm a young middle schooler who's pretty tech-savvy and looking to share knowledge on some stuff.

One thing I've done recently is trying to bring back an old laptop. Not horribly old - only about 6 years old, however it was running Windows 11 (eugh) and took 15 seconds to open a browser.

Here's how I turned that 15 seconds into 2, and turned it into a real, working laptop again, that you can use for pretty much anything that a typical person uses a laptop for.

Maybe not workstation and stuff like that but it does anything you could ask out of a laptop.

Lets go!

1. I used Arch Linux. I know it's a hard first time distro however if you've ever distro-hopped before like me - I switched from Nobara -> CachyOS -> Arch (not for just the larp) and have gained some experience. I used the included archinstall script and made sure to add modules like:

Bluetooth

Printers

Pipewire

Make sure to also get an LTS kernel, and configure limine!

And since Arch's iso is only about 1.4 GB, it's impressively lightweight and speeds up any old system.

Yes, I know that there are other distros out there that are specifically targeted towards old hardware; however, I find that Arch is by far the most customizable.

The AUR and Pacman also add to reasons of why to use Arch.

1. Format as btrfs (if you have a decent ssd)

For SSD's always use btrfs. It's stable, and offers a lot of backup snapshots. Although raw speed is not the same, btrfs uses some form of zstd compression when moving around files and speeds up real world performance.

1. Choose a light DE

This one's especially important. If you have decent hardware from the last 5-8 years or so, something like KDE or Budgie (what I use) wouldn't hurt. Older than that? A few options:

1. XFCE. I've used this one before. Pretty fast, but it doesn't have Wayland support and though responsive, lightdm is buggy.

2. LXDE. Like xfce, I think, but even better for old hardware.

3. LXQt. What I recommend. Uses Qtile framework, so wayland support included out of the box; the successor to LXDE.

4. OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE!

This step takes the longest so I won't list every exact thing I did here. I'll just list what I did, not how. That's a bigger conversation for a different day.

1. Configured terminal - swapped from stock terminal to Kitty; changed shell from bash -> fish, configured starship, added shortcuts.

2. Kernel - Cross-compiled a kernel (tkg) from my main rig, optimized with every instruction the laptop had - Full LTO, znver1, and -O3 optimizations to squeeze performance out of the computer.

3. Configured ease of use - took so long. Configured paru, installed limine-update-tools and such for the limine bootloader and configured that, and a lot more.

The results speak for themselves.

Here's for a Lenovo 81W1, with a Ryzen 5 3500U APU:

Single core - 1,149 (Average - 878) Total gain - \~31%

Multi-core - 3,298 (Average -2,512) Total gain - \~31%

Try it for yourself.

Thanks for reading. Peace out, have a blessed day!