Recently I tried to repair my (not so) old Acer Aspire One A150 netbook, which battery died unexpectedly from night to day. To my very surprise, it was just a BIOS error preventing the computer to charge it. After following some easy instructions, it's now up and running for more than two hours without recharge.

Last but not least. It had Ubuntu installed, and since last updates it was unbearably slow. I never liked Ubuntu too much, due to its trend to make whatever radical change from update to update, with the target put in convincing hesitant people coming from other platforms.

At this stage even apt-get stopped working, with raising conflicts impossible to solve that finally I got sick of. So I decided to put something small, minimum but enough, quick and cute, a combination that already went well in other old PC that I use at the studio to run the Hammond organ emulation software: Debian with Window Maker. Here it goes a screenshot:

Beautiful, isn't it? Irresistible in its imitation of the classical NeXTSTEP user interface, it is a very comfortable and fast window manager. The netbook is flying now, it has never worked so fluid, specially useful and fast is workspace switching, amazing.

Nevertheless, there is a price to pay: it lacks many of the functionalities you'd expect to have in a modern desktop, but… are they really necessary? Since the mass spread of devices such as smartphones and tablets, I have the impression that the concept of Desktop is getting outdated, and even more in a netbook. And these enormous icons and simple concepts like the Dock provide the adequate immediacy for this kind of devices.

Additionally, not the credit for Window Maker in this case, tweaking a bit X-Window configuration multitouch works great now, I would never had thought from this old netbook…