alt Hacker NewsSimilarly, I was hacking on a tiny netbook before I was a professional programmer, everything about it was awful, the keyboard was Norwegian and it was missing some keys, but eventually I managed to build up enough of a portfolio with it that I got my first internship and eventually got hired. Old photo (2013) of it, running Kubuntu (Xubuntu maybe even?) at this point I think: https://i.imgur.com/1NRIZrg.jpeg
Haha, same vibe! Mine was running mandrake/mandriva + kde. Also programming on such a low specced device gave a superpower (and good coding hygiene): you would immediately spot memleaks and inefficient code because you would feel it as entire seconds of slowness and unresponsiveness. Like, none of my GUI apps had work happening on the event thread, but I could immediately tell which ones would.