Making old machines run a modern Linux distribution surprisingly well (using Zswap)

In between study sessions, I've been experimenting with some old hardware that I want to get rid of on eBay. I happen to have managed to get an old IBM A31 with 384 MB of RAM up and browsing the Web while using a modern operating system, namely: Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 (LXDE), kernel version 4.2.

The challenges here are plenty: low RAM, extremely slow and old rotational hard drive (20 GB), and the ever-increasing presence of complex multimedia and Javascript on the modern Web.

The key to my success has been the use of Zswap. In a nutshell, Zswap compresses pages that would be normally swapped out of RAM (and onto disk) into a separate storage area (in RAM) that is first compressed before being queued for swapping. This effectively increases the RAM of the computer in exchange for CPU time. With a system that is heavily I/O constrained, this is a very reasonable trade-off to make.

In order to make the default installation of Manjaro XFCE functional under such constraints:

1. Edit /etc/default/grub and configure zswap to use the more space-efficient deflate compressor:
1. Append "zswap.enabled=1 zswap.compressor=deflate zswap.max_pool_percent=90" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
   
2. update-grub
   
2. Add the deflate module to the initial ramdisk by editing /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:
1. Append "deflate" to MODULES
   
2. Look inside of /etc/mkinitcpio.d/ to determine what profile to specify for rebuilding the ramdisk. If you are using the Linux 4.2 kernel (recommended):
   mkinitcpio -p linux42
3. Uninstall the resource-hungry pulseaudio subsystem:
1. pacman -R pulseaudio pulseaudio-ctl pulseaudio-alsa
4. Install and use QupZilla as the default web browser
1. pacman -Sy qupzilla
   
5. For even better performance, change QupZilla's User-Agent string to an Android Webkit-based mobile device:
1. Edit -> Preferences -> Other -> Change browser identification / User Agent Manager -> Change global User Agent
   
   I suggest:
   Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.3; en-us; HTC Sensation Build/IML74K) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/538.1

Remarkably, these changes allow a full Web experience. Even Youtube videos seem to function.

On such a machine -- and in order to reduce slow disk I/O -- it might be advantageous to use a btrfs root filesystem mounted with gzip compression.