Brickfrog

Core 2 Duos are slow, yeah. I’ve got an Asus F8SP-X1 laptop from ~ 2008 with a Core 2 Duo T9500, 4 GB RAM, and a SSD SATA drive in it. It was originally a mid-range Windows Vista system. Over its years I managed to upgrade it as far as it could go. It does run standard Ubuntu and Windows 10 - Certainly not fast but it does run. Performance would lean towards unbearable without the SSD. I suspect Gnome isn’t doing it any favors and switching to a lighter DE or distro would help (or maybe just ditching the DE altogether) but since it’s just a spare laptop it’s no big deal.

One of the takeaways from your experiment is if it the system was already crap at running Windows 10 it’s not necessarily going to fare better with Linux, at least if you’re expecting a nice desktop environment. I don’t know if in 2025 we need to equate the “will this run Linux?” challenge on old Windows XP/7 hardware aside from the geek/techie users that want to do something with that old hardware. Anyone else non-technical stuck with that type of hardware isn’t thinking about Windows 10 being retired.

Sort of. Orbot is fine but for it to work it does have to modify the system’s networking. It installs itself as a VPN so if I try to use it it’ll kick me off the VPN my Android was already using. So yes Orbot can sort of let me pick apps to run over Tor but to do so it forces me off-VPN for all my other apps. Maybe that’s an Android limitation or an Orbot quirk, not really sure.

The nice thing about this new Oniux is that it works more like a container for applications rather than have to modify the system’s network.

Would be cool if this could work on Android and essentially be able to pick and choose which apps to run over Tor.