Hi commodore256, thanks for sharing your experiences, and particularly the
fine detail on the hardware. You obviously go to much greater lengths on this
score than I do. I just do the absolute minimum with the hardware that allows
the OS to boot without crashing and hope for the best ;)
I'm glad that Trisquel is serving you well. I've been running it for years
now on whatever old hardware I can scrape together, starting with 6.0 (or was
it 5.0?). FYI When my 1GB RAM netbook was running 7.0 (which used GNOME
Fallback, not Mate), upgrading to an SSD made more difference to the
performance than doubling the RAM. To be honest though, the single biggest
improvement in performance came when I started using NoScript (no more
freezes and crashes!). The modern web really is an hellscape of lazily
engineering and often user-abusing Javascript.
A few things:
Given your knowledge of hardware, I assume you know about Libreboot. Is this
what you mean by "flash" Coreboot without blobs?
You mention Trisquel 9.0. AFAIK this is still in the testing phase, and 8.0
was the last stable release. Did you get it to work in this end? Or did you
go back to 8.0?
Pidgin. Convincing your family and friends to switch to a free code chat
service like Wire or Signal is better for *their* software freedom and
privacy, but we all know what a struggle that is ;) Pidgin is 100% free code
on your end and is a reasonable compromise. In fact, up until recently,
Pidgin was the default IM app on Trisquel.
From memory, in the 8.0 release IceDove replaced both the Evolution email
client and Pidgin, as IceDove has an Jabber chat client built in. One
downside of Pidgin though, is that development hasn't been as active for
about 5 years and it's falling a bit behind on features (see their entry on
OpenHub, but use a script blocker! My goodness ...). Just something to keep a
weather eye on.
Welcome to the free world!
