Considering most modern OS add some source of strain, from Windows 10 to many mainstream flavours of Linux, due to temporal dithering or gpu issues, does it make sense to start testing for extremely lightweight linux distros, disabling entirely hardware acceleration/gpu? Just for minor tasks like safe reading/writing.
In theory a "safer pc" should have less weird stuff going on, with a very simple OS, or am I wrong? Any experience?
Asahi for the M1 CPUs from Apple has no acceleration but the physical hardware is set up the way it is, so who knows.
I do not believe that not using hardware acceleration is a realistic solution.
when testing various Linux distros with the intent of lightweightiness, I think an ideal first step in testing would be to initially test the OS with simply booting into the script shell, because that's as lightweight as it would get in terms of graphics drivers being activated etc.
Not really. What driver is it using to render? We haven't used text-mode resolutions in decades.
There is always something, framebuffer, etc.
I also think it's a waste of time hanging around the command prompt or the bootloader. Just go directly to the environment you actually want to be in, and see how it is there with the configured driver it is using there.
On my hardware using a distro of a specific version, I found x.org gnome to be more comfortable than wayland gnome. Could be different now. Variables? Many.. including the compositor.
The lightest Linux distro I used was called Puppy Linux. When I used it nearly a decade ago, it was fine on my eyes; but this was before any devices gave me issues. The default browser is PaleMoon, which is based on an old version of Firefox, but still gets security updates, IIRC.
If anyone tries it, let me know. It is light enough to run from a USB Drive (and pretty well, but I wouldn't recommend for daily use).