link legendofzelda is probably the only character most ppl know abt who is simultaneously all genders, no genders, a random guy really good at his job, a nonliteral representation of legendary triumph given a gender as placeholder, the purified essence of positive apathy, the antithesis of apathy personified, your friend who all of your hot friends wish they were, a sminky fellowe wot's got a swerd, and your most feared being's most feared being armed from the armory of perfect hope which cannot be respectfully reduced in description to any gender you know
i think this is cool. no matter what ur gender is, if u like link, link's got ur gender. this is good. unless u want it back
And guess what?
It's runs like shit!
Okay here are some details about this. The netbook I shown in this post is a Toshiba NB305. It has Windows Vista Starter preinstalled, 1 GB of RAM, and it gets very hot all the time. Windows 7 (Ultimate) runs like shit on this netbook and (modern) Linux runs like shit on this netbook. I don't know how Windows Vista Starter runs on this but it presumably runs like shit too.
Here are some timeline about this terrible netbook:
- My dad bought it around 2009-2010
- Used it as his daily driver until 2019
- Installed Windows XP on it around 2011 presumably because Windows Vista runs like shit
- Installed Windows 7 on it around 2012 because modern programs doesn't work on it
- Gave it to me in 2019 after he got a much better Asus laptop
- Immediately installed Windows 8.1 on it and use it as a daily driver
- Installed Xubuntu on it around 2020 and accidentally wiped all of my dad's important data (thank god my dad doesn't know about it)
- Distrohopped several times in this shitty netbook from 2021-2023, all of the distros I used in this netbook runs like shit (brief summary: Arch in 2021, NixOS in early 2022, Arch again in mid 2022, Void in late 2022, and Arch yet again in 2023. The recent Arch reinstall was done only a week ago!)
Also this might be one of the most cursed netbooks (well besides those Dell laptops with Latitude-ON) I ever shown. Why?
It's because it has a 64-bit processor.
Yes, you heard me right, a 64-bit processor. Most netbooks at the time uses a 32-bit processor since it's much lighter in power consumption, but this has a full on 64-bit Intel Atom processor. Yes, 64-bit Intel Atom processor is a thing even in late 2000s and early 2010s. You can just throw in any modern operating system for the x86-64 architecture to this shitty netbook and it will probably works.
Okay now onto how I turned this into a smart TV.
One day when I was using the netbook, the screen suddenly broke not by accidentally breaking it, but by trying to install Haiku to this piece of shit. Yes, apparently Haiku managed to break the LCD screen during the boot screen by fading out into an inverted version of the screen and later turns into plain black. It was initially temporary but it became permanent after several Haiku installation attempts meaning that I have to hook up an external monitor to this thing.
I have an LG monitor but the screen is also broken too, so what did I use? Thankfully our family have a 24 inch dumb TV that wasn't used for a while after we switched to streaming and happens to be also from LG. It also happens to have a VGA port (since this netbook doesn't have a HDMI port) which I can simply hook up and use with my netbook.
And the next thing I did to it? Install Plasma Bigscreen to it. After all I already have Plasma Desktop installed to it (I always install KDE Plasma every time I distrohop) so why not I guess? And guess what? It actually works...
...horribly.
For some reason, the app tiles were solid red instead of semi-transparent blue with a border like on most Plasma Bigscreen screenshots. I guess it's because the Intel GPU driver doesn't work properly with the Intel Atom integrated GPU. It might be also the reason why SDDM always flashes white every time I moved my mouse around or interact with it. I might look into that further.
Oh and the YouTube client I shown you earlier? Well it's just a wrapper around YouTube's smart TV client that uses Firefox's kiosk mode. All you need is:
- Create a new Firefox profile and launch it
- Change the user agent on it to an Android TV user agent so the smart TV client works
- Set the homepage to youtube.com/tv
- Create a .desktop file that looks like this
/usr/share/applications/youtube.desktop[Desktop Entry] Name=YouTube Exec=/usr/bin/firefox --no-remote --kiosk -P YouTube Icon=minitube Terminal=False Type=Application Categories=Network;AudioVideo
made with @nex3's syntax highlighter
- And you got yourself a YouTube smart TV client wrapper that only uses Firefox and nothing else
I'm planning to upgrade this shitty netbook's RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB and also install an SSD to it. The HDD is already dying in this shitty netbook so installing an SSD sounds like a good idea. Installing an SSD would already make it much faster and quiter but installing 2 gigs of RAM might improve the performance even further.