For surfing the web, checking mails, editing and uploading some fotos it is sufficient and I prefer using a laptop for this.

I used to run Xubuntu on it, but lately it had performance issues and all programs and actions were lagging very significantly. So I decided to reinstall the OS and try Lubuntu, since it should be even more lean.

I grabbed the current Lubuntu image (25.04 Plucky Puffin), created a bootable USB stick, and installed Lubuntu. So far, so good. And indeed, everything felt much smoother and faster.

But, as usual, there are some post-installation hiccups which needed a bit more tuning.

1. Wifi
   WiFi was not working out of the box.
   The E145 ships with a Broadcom WiFi chip (BCM43142), and the drivers are proprietary and need to be installed separately. After some Googling and trying this and that, this finally worked for me:
   sudo apt install broadcom-sta-dkms
reboot
   And WiFi worked. :)
2. Encryption
   Another change is the encryption strategy:
   before I had only my home directory encrypted, but this option wasn’t available anymore in the Lubuntu installer.
   Apparently, encoding only the home directory is discouraged nowadays since it has some security flaws. (“Encrypting only the home directory leaves swap, temp files, and system logs unprotected, exposing sensitive data.”)
   So this time I encrypted the whole disk, as offered in the installer. However, now I would have to enter the passphrase to decrypt the disk and then I would also have to enter user credentials to log in. This felt a bit cumbersome, so I enabled auto-login since I will be the only user using this laptop. And now I only have to enter the passphrase and can immediately use it.
3. Browsers
   There are more and more browsers to choose from, so picking the right one becomes a task.
   I used to use Chromium, but since I have had rather bad experiences with the Snap install and there is no easy other way to install Chromium, I simply turned to Chrome.
   Not the best choice in privacy regards, admittedly. But I will be using my Google account on this browser anyway, and then it is the full package.
   For more privacy-focused browsing, I will use Librewolf, a Firefox clone with privacy and security focus.

Librewolf recommends installation on Ubuntu/Debian via the Extrepo tool.
Extrepo is a neat tool that takes care of adding external repositories and installing software from there in one command.

Turned out Extrepo can also install Chrome, so I installed both browsers with it.
First install Extrepo:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install extrepo -y
Then install Librewolf & Chrome:
sudo extrepo enable librewolf
sudo extrepo enable google-chrome

That’s it so far. Ready to use my old travel laptop for some more years with newest software.
Keep using old hardware!