My only laptop is a IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad X60s, a top line “ultrabook” from 2006 that features: - An Intel Core Duo L2400 dual core 32 bit CPU, clocked at 1.66 Ghz; - 2GB of RAM; - 60GB of SATA1 hard drive; - Wifi, Bluetooth, trackpoint mouse only, 56k modem, and a decent set of I/0 ports (including a CardBus slot!).

This machine had an installation on Arch Linux, and I was using it for school stuff. It runned smoothly KDE5, Atom (great editor, I’m using it to write this article), and it was usable even with Phpstorm. Pretty impressive for such an old machine, right?

Since now I don’t need this laptop every day I decided to give a try at Gentoo, another rolling relase, DIY install distro. This was both a test of my skills, my patience and the performances of the machine. For those of you that don’t know, Gentoo hasn’t binary packages: imagine using Arch with just a developer mantained AUR.