My experience using Trisquel so far

First, I want to say my hardware specs aren't optimal, I just really wanted to get going and my tube of thermal paste is spent after putting the cooler on to test it. My CPU us a Pentium 2.7ghz with 2MB of L2 Cache and can only support SSE3 and I only have 2GB of RAM installed. That is because while I actually have the fastest Core2 Quad this board supports at 3Ghz, 6MB of L2 per dual core cluster (It's kinda like a precursor to Zen) and it supports SSE4.1 and I actually have 8GB of DDR2, the really rare and expensive kind that can get me 2x4GB and still be non-ecc intel compatible, but I'm kinda worried if something goes wrong flashing my bios chips, I might fry my RAM with it, so I figure if I do fry it, I might as well fry the cheap stuff and I'm out of thermal paste for my CPU, but I do have a graphite pad and I think those damned push pin coolers with the circular block might snage the graphite pad, so I'll save that for a bigger and better cooler that probably won't snag the graphite pad.

So that's why I'm not using the most optimal config, I think I'll flash coreboot without blobs tomorrow because it's more up to date. Speaking of which, a good side ramble would be I'm curious of what I could do with a libre bios instead of disabling IME, I just use it for something else. Maybe since it's intel 8088 based maybe have it be for a hyervisor for a z80 console with libre homebrew roms or maybe an IME architecture based fantasy console. "Either the user controls the hardware or the hardware controls the user". I just want to do it out of spite. Lemons into lemonade I suppose.

But anyway, after installing it, I tried upgrading to 9.0 twice following instructions found on this forum and I rather not mess with it and one of the times installing Trisquel, I was frustrated that it wouldn't install and I looked carefully at the error message and it said my optical drive was dirty, so instead of cleaning it, I threw it away because the one that came with that computer didn't even burn DVDs and I put in another one I had lying around. I also tried installing sysvinit, was a bad time, I'm lucky I knew how to chroot. I also tried installing other free distros, but Parabola and the Parabola installation on top of Manjaro didn't work for me. I'm not sure how people feel about this but I was able to get pidgin working with plugins (all GPL licensed) that hook into centralized trash "services" like discord and Skype. Yeah, I know the national spying agency looks at those logs, but if I want to talk to boomers, it's better than running their applications that could be doing heave knows what. I also installed the latest mumble.

But I have to say, so far, I am quite pleasantly surprised. When I was messing with Manjaro on this machine, it used way more ram (even on xfce) and it took forever to compress a compiled package. Having midori, mumble and pidgin up with all of the plugins and chatrooms, the whole system runs on 1GB of RAM and the gaming performance really surprised me. on my Sandy Bridge Machine, Quake3 in the latest build of IOQuake3 was dogshit slow, but I cranked up everything on Openarena at 1920x1440 and got 20fps and on Sandy, I got lower numbers on lower settings in Quake3. I can see why people donate so much, you can see the care the maintainers have taken in picking optimized experience for thees experiences. The distro is a work of craftsmanship. (I use that as a gender-neutral term)

My experience of installing Trisquel brought me back to the days when I first discovered GNU/Linux Distros. Having a couple issues, but figuring it out and those days when I searched the Ubuntu Repo for games and I discovered OpenArena. I think I'm satisfied with this level of computing and I feel free software is a good part of a technology diet. What makes a diet work is the lifestyle and it seems like most people's technology diet is just pop-tarts and cinnamon toast crunch. I'm going to be more analog.