background

Started to use the asus vivobook in 2020, and windows had gotten increasingly bogged down and very slow. In addition, I installed WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) with Ubuntu, but it was also excruciatingly slow, and my battery life was suffering as well. I gave in and switched to mac in 2025, and in Janurary I decided to do something with the old laptop instead of letting it rot.

hardware results

Swapping out windows for linux (cachyos) made it so much snappier - near mac levels.
I also swapped out the battery which cost only (100HKD / 12 USD), and it can sustain one day of moderate usage.

software work

Setting up everything made me get familiar with the terminal, git and basically how operating systems work.

Used rofi, waybar, awww, pywal, kitty

problems

It took a lot of tinkering, setup and maintaing - definitely not plug and play. Major problems included a crash resulting in me rolling back to LTS kernel due to some desyncs requiring chroot in a live OS, limine syncing problems.