So far I've determined a ~10 year old netbooks lack the computing power for a modern desktop graphical user interface, even those considered lightweight by today's standards. Was it always sluggish even in its prime? It's a little hard to tell from here, because even though computers have undoubtedly gotten faster, our expectations have risen as well.

But there's more to a computer's capability than pushing pixels around, so we fall back to the next round of experiments with command line interface systems. And since we've already established that a solid state drive was not a great performance booster on this platform, I put the original spinning platter hard drive back in for the next round.

This time instead of Ubuntu Desktop, I installed Ubuntu server edition instead. This minimalist distribution lacks the user friendliness of a graphical user interface, but it also lacks the graphics processing workload of displaying one as well. As a result this machine is quite snappy and responsive. I found it quite usable, especially now that I've learned about virtual consoles and use the Alt key plus F1 through F6 to switch between up to six different sessions. Simple tasks like running Python scripts and running a basic server were done easily and quickly.

I started experimenting with Ubuntu 16, because Ubuntu did not release prebuilt installation binaries for 32-bit Ubuntu 18. However, once Ubuntu 16 server was and and running, I was able to rundo-release-upgrade to move up to Ubuntu 18. From minor tinkering I didn't notice any significant difference between them.

Then I remembered I had played with an even more minimalist Ubuntu earlier, on an even older machine. Ubuntu 18 Snappy Core is available for 32-bit i386 processors, and it installed successfully on this laptop. Now I have one more incentive to learn how to build my own snaps to install on such a system. I just have to remember to that I can only connect to an Ubuntu Snap machine via SSH, and the list of valid keys associated with an account do not auto-update. I typically generate a SSH key every time I reset a machine, and I no longer have the keys to access my previous snappy core experiment. I ended up reinstalling snappy core to pick up the current set of SSH keys.