I have this 11 year old oddly resistant Pentium laptop and I'm thinking of turning it into a reading/light-programming tool. It used to run great back in the day but modern software has gotten so bloated that it can barely run GNOME with Firefox, so I was thinking of sticking to command line only. Is there anything specific I should look into?
In specific I mainly only want to be able to download and read mdbooks in the terminal, probably using archlinux32 as the OS (or maybe LFS?). Captcha abuse and all that javascript already ruined browsing with Lynx so I have little hopes of actually browsing the web. I also intend to get a new battery as it only lasts 1-2 hours nowadays. Any other 32bit/tty-only customisation guides are also welcome.
One thing to consider there is that CPUs are much more efficient now. So if it is a really old laptop, it might consume quite a low of power.
Yeah, there is that too, but it is going to be idling most of the time and laptop CPUs have been designed to conserve battery for a while now, so they should behave when not under load.