The c2d MacBooks ought to have relatively cheap and available batteries. Why not put one in?
There’s lots of uses for it.
An overlay network like nebula uses “lighthouse” nodes as ways to reverse proxy to all the other hosts in the overlay. I’ve used og eeepcs as nebula lighthouses before.
“Dumb” 3d printers honestly don’t need much to bring their feature set in line with expensive ones. I still use an old netbook to control two. The screen and keyboard are great when I want to check files. Slicers and whatnot can easily run in low resource settings on those computers.
Vents allowing (and many netbooks do!), you can slide the computer into a shelf and use ssh to perform tasks on it. There’s a bunch of stuff that an always on computer with a built in battery backup can be used for at times, especially if it’s on a wired connection and you can use the wireless interface.
People will say you should be afraid of the batteries exploding or venting. I’m honestly not too concerned, but be sure to check them maybe once or twice a year.
There’s a bunch of dot files and directories in your home directory that are used to store configurations and presets and stuff.
It used to be that if you logged in without those files and directories then x, the display manager, the other software etc would copy over stub versions and that’s how you get “defaults”.
So when I have a hairy x session I used to delete the configuration files and directories and let it repopulate with defaults.
Nowadays I don’t do that anymore, but it used to be an issue.
E: try ctrl alt f1 or two or something and see if you get a terminal or login prompt.
You can always just delete you user config directories, uninstall Xfce then log back in snd see what happens…
Oh I don’t care what distro you use. It’s just funny to say numbnuts instead of numbat.
old windows -> xfce/lxqt/whatever
nuwindows -> kde
macos/phones -> gnome
you're running xfce!
do you want to be running some other desktop environment?
if so, look at what kind of session your remote connection software is asking the remote machine to start.
Stop trying to make him sound cool.
amber is the color of its energy!
It’s helpful to in this case to say what you’re actually trying to do.
I don’t think you want multiseat, but I did something similar with x back in the day using a configuration for users similar to what’s described here.
Note that that isn’t what you asked for. It’s having multiple x sessions on different f1, f2 etc keys.
Some more things I’ve used old netbooks for:
Portable pxe boot server
Audio source for mixing (think using a mixing board to do audio collage work with tape, record and digital sources)
Midi sequencer- the cheap usb to midi breakout cable works good here and you really don’t need much horsepower to sequence midi.
Tracker playback and editing
Display driver/art/digital photo collage/digital signage/whatever.
E: People will tell you that you’re better off with a sbc because it’ll save you money on power. Do your own research on this. A kill-a-watt is cheap and the power savings quickly gets murky.