Over the weekend I was given a crap 2in1 notebook. It is 10 years old and even by standards back then had low end hardware (MSRP was 300 Euro according to some googling).
The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon I completely forgot existed and many distributions no longer support.
Not only does postmarketOS support 32bit UEFI, thanks to its smartphone focus it comes with zram preconfigured. Installation was easy using the graphical installer for generic x86-64.
So now I run a fully featured desktop, KDE Plasma, on it. None of that "lightweight" stuff that sacrifices features and usability for a few megabytes of RAM.
I only tweaked it a little bit. Firefox ran like shit. Chromium was better in that regard but for whatver reason YouTube specifically kept logging me out. Also RAM ran out once and Chromium was force closed by the OS.
I ended up installing KDE’s Falkon browser which offers the benefits of Chromium’s rendering speed without the logging out of YouTube part. It's also a bit less resource intensive, yet comes wih an ad blocker and support for user scripts which relieves the lack of proper extensions.
pmOS doesn't come with swap by default. I added a swap file which is quickly done. It's barely used since switching to Falkon, currently only 100MB.
YouTube video playback at 1080p is smooth. Zero problems with suspend so far.
I'm not sure if it's the result of defective hardware or just driver incompatibilities but Bluetooth is not recognized (bummer) and the camera isn't either (don't care for it).
Long story short:
I rescued a crap PC from the scrap pile. It's now genuinely usable, albeit with the aformentioned caveats.
Interesting, I got almost the same hardware, (not a 3735F but G and only 1gb of ram )but I couldn't get good performance with linux , video playback was limited to 720p using freetube with Debian and with lubuntu it was even worse.With windows ( a lighter version ofc) however playing 1080p was really smooth with no hiccups during a whole movie with vlc, same with jellyfin, I just wasn't able to find a working driver for the touch panel.I know that with only 1 GB of ram I can't expect much but I find the graphical part somewhat lacking on Linux... The Bluetooth was working on mine with Linux, but was a real pain to get to work on windows , no cameras ether on Linux but recognised on windows. For now windows does the job but for the 64 bit support I kinda miss Linux . thanks for sharing your experience , this might motivate me once again !