Wanted to make a note of clarifying a post I made on the former weblog back on Feb 2nd: “Firefox Crashing X11”
In that post, I explain that my T400 ThinkPad experiences X.org crashes on average once or twice a day. This was on both Debian 12, and FreeBSD 13. On FireFox from the main repo, FF ESR, and even on the latest FireFox which I went out of the way to get V134 set up on Debian Stable. I thought this fixed the problem, but I was wrong.
Pretty sure it has something to do with the machine’s ancient GMA 4500 (or the 915 driver) and some GL stuff which when it tries to run, X just immediately crashes.
Just wanted to say that I’ve been running Alpine Linux on the old ThinkPad, and my web experience has been rock solid. No more issues. I occasionally boot back into Debian, and still happening there but whatever. At some point I’ll do the necessary digging if the problem persists so I can properly report the bug.
But anyway, Debian is nice for old machines. Debian without systemd is quite light and nimble, indeed. But Alpine? Alpine is like an arrow and a feather, as one. HIGHLY recommended! I’ve been running it off a 16 GB SATA DOM in the ultra bay. https://alpinelinux.org