LXDE's file manager is a piece of software I like very much, at least if you only use it in detailed view. Perhaps not very visible is it will run in restrained conditions such as a Pentium II 233 and less than 128MB RAM, and still be quick. It has had tabs support from the beginning and seems to have about the features of nautilus 2.x.
Well, I happen to not like the choice of themes in lubuntu very much (GTK, icons..)
The file manager - pcmanfm - can look better with another theme, "crumbs bar" to display the folder location (if you like that) and it shines with the left side panel disabled : can show a lot of files and folders while not using too much horizontal pixel space. With the speed, even on OLD or limited computers, that makes it my favourite tool for browsing a large music collection.
With the low footprint and desktop independance it's also about the right tool for a VM or headless server.

For browsing video and documents etc. in icon mode I've grown used to caja, now.

Mate is rather fine, in terms of weight it's more like XP whereas Cinnamon is a bit more like Vista. It's just gnome 2, which used to be what went on machines with 512MB RAM back when that was the sweet spot for a PC.
Lately, the biggest issue I'm seeing is recent VLC takes a long time to start (2.x, or is that 2.1.x specifically), afterwards it works as usual. The first file manager window you open (caja) takes a few seconds on a slow HDD but then it's fine.
I go to LXDE if RAM saving is needed. Xfce is similar to both in UI (with the common denominator being, till now, GTK2)

Whatever you use, the PC is limited by disk I/O. On a I/O bound PC that is not CPU bound or memory bound, just be confident and wait a little.
It might all be a bit moot : the applications themselves may use more and bigger libraries. It's typical to use a mix of GTK2, Qt and GTK3 applications so there's more libraries to load that are not already in RAM or disk cache.

I thought Windows XP wouldn't give hardware access to the COM port to the DOS application, but it looks like I was wrong.

Creating value by burning carbon has little or no moral value, and it is what everyone does if they drive a car or shower almost daily, among other things taken for granted. Global warming and ocean acidification are a monstrous thing*, and contributing to them hampers dignity. I favor basic income precisely to create a class of people for whom enough will be enough, and reducing economic output or GDP is to be viewed as a good thing.

What about the violence of cars speeding at 70mph, or the distorted concurrence from people still mired in 20th century thinking. Also, you rely on the threat of violence to keep your properties : government allows you to keep what you keep.

* science works and is designed to keep political pressure and bullshit out.

Serial cable is easy. No disassembly and there's built-in software in Windows (though you can use it to load better transfer software). The only thing there's to it is to select COM1 or COM2, baud rate and it takes many hours.

The names tell that story too. IDE is Integrated Drive Electronics, and ATA is "AT Attachment" (ISA is the same thing as AT bus)

Kermit works fine for transfers between DOS and linux. Easy or not, you can figure it out. What was easy about it is the availability.

115200 baud is likely. I think that's what the average "fast serial port" does.
With a really old PC or something funky like an IBM PS/2, that's another problem. The PS/2 seems to supports 38400 baud but for some reason I made the transfer at 19200 baud now that's slow. But I did transfer doom2, that I compressed with ARJ before.

Would you like help?

- Get help with writing the suicide letter

- Just type the suicide letter without help

[] Don't show me this tip again*
* greyed out

Also why we're able to see brown dwarves at all. It's a much lower scale gravitational collapse that will simply leave a frozen, dead Jupiter behind but there's sizable heat content in there (though perhaps augmented by deuterium + tritium fusion early on, and then radioactive decay like in Earth)

That's one big danger when blindly following a bike path. If the bike path is on the road, you can at least avoid doing that if you're not careless ; if the bike path is on a sidewalk or well segregated now it's the cars that ram into you on your left side, unless maybe you get off the bike (or stop) and cross like a pedestrian.
Often times, best is for the bike rider to use the "car lanes" to overtake that turning car on the left side. A bike even belongs on the leftmost lane if it wants to turn left.

It depends on places and the traffic but bikes should be able to leave the bike lane easily. Segregated bike lane is awful if it's not properly done.

Or should I say not terrible, but there are good things in that lone screenshot. No huge window borders for a start (maybe too thin then, looks like zero pixel border?), title bar a bit ugly but the color theme minimizes the ugliness.
The icons are inconsistent due to a mix of appearances : the trash can and some drives are in "realistic" style, like in XP and early OSX. The "line art" icons, I somewhat like them though perhaps the colors aren't great ("open folder with another icon in it"). But why I like them is they look like 80s icons to me, like Xerox desktop, Apple Lisa, Atari ST etc. !

I didn't experience such a bug but that's why I like having a "refresh" button in the file manager. You could add it to XP's file manager by the way - built-in feature for customizing the toolbar. You can press F5 or perhaps go to the view or edit menu, but if the feature is useful it may deserve being in the GUI.

Indeed, I had the bottom panel sometimes and regularly covering max'ed windows on my desktop. It seems to have gone away. Now it isn't glitchy but I have the usual feelings of having a brittle computer : stuff that won't run properly in Wine or Dosbox, source software (.tar.gz) that doesn't build with no useful documentation about the missing dependencies, and a few OpenGL issues but that's because I need to replace the graphics card and want the right kind of (recent enough but slightly old, low end enough but still with support of dual VGA)

From experience too, the linux experience can be really great for some people. If you have Windows or a Mac and only run Firefox, VLC and the file manager, you'll have no trouble running only Firefox, VLC and the file manager.

Single thread CPU performance stopped improving a good while ago - or more strictly speaking it goes up very slowly. Please.. these ads will only make everyone's life worse.
End result, everyone will have to block ads. I'm not buying a new motherboard, CPU and RAM to have the PC not struggle under the load of ads.