So i have a bunch of pc’s/laptops/computers and such that my family members refuse to depart with even though there really bad. so far they mangae to keep 4 bulky computers in total, we do have some new-ish ones but theses ones im talking about need some loving.1 computer is 32 bit and has 2gb of ram, the other 3 have 64-bit and range from 1gb of ram- to 2 and one of which has only 75 space hardrive.
are there any linux distros that might work becasue im a noob who uses windows so im very lost. any tips or suggestions or something would be great.
also if im posting in the wrong plac eplease let me know in the comments.
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Try mint with Xfce - on 64 bit machines and then go lighter.
alright and are you sure that is the best starter option? also what can i do on linux compared to windows?
best option
Ubuntu is popular and new-user friendly. And xfce is generally lighter on resources. It’s a good choice.
What can I do
Almost everything.
Some proprietary apps you’ve used from windows may not be available, but equivalent ones would be available on linux.
Stuff like browsing the web(provided that you don’t open too many tabs, because you have low ram) and watching movies n all is quite good.
What all things fo you intend to do on it? I think it’ll be easier to check that the things you want are there.- Gaming is less stable overall but it’s exponentially better now thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck driving support. Like seriously, from a cointoss whether it even launches a couple years ago to 74% Gold or Platinum on the top 1000 games on Steam.
- Programming is easier (you can ask your commandline to install all you need at once instead of having to painstakingly individually install and set up requirements or addons to programming languages), but you don’t have access to Visual Studio if you’re working on C# or C++.
- Web browsing is identical, watching movies too. I’ve never had a problem using LibreOffice and OnlyOffice as a replacement for Word and PowerPoint, but I don’t use many complicated features in Word or PowerPoint so your mileage may vary.
- Photoshop, Premiere, etc are a pain to get good replacements for, OBS for recording and DaVinci Resolve for editing is a really powerful pair though.
- I vouch for Mint with XFCE too. It was very fast on my laptop and some of the themes now are pretty. It barely uses any RAM. It has a Windows-style start menu and taskbar.
Just be warned that your family members will probably have (usually solvable) issues if they want to do anything beyond web browsing. It’s a different operating system after all and it works differently in a lot of ways. Definitely recommend looking up some videos about Mint, XFCE, transitioning from Windows to Linux.
I’d like to do something similar on my Pentium 3 box. Maybe Debian with a really light WM would be a good fit, maybe IceWM? It only has 512MB of RAM though so I might have to go even lighter than Debian. I also have an Athlon XP box with 2GB of RAM, but that’s too new to be fun. :p
Would also recommend Debian or Puppy. Maybe also take a look at Distrochooser?
those are very low specs for every day distros (meaning usable for the general public), you might get away with linux mint xfce, if it ends up usable on those machine and not lag too much then don’t bother with anything else, otherwise you might have to install lighter stuff like antix or lxle. If none of the above are usable you can always install puppy linux, it can run on a toaster but is not very pleasant to use. note that regardless of distro, surfing the web is going to be a chore due to half of the modern internet being heavy as fuck and hard to run, you might want to look for alternative frontend to websites like piped for youtube, urlebird for tiktok etc.
I’ve said my peace about distro and desktop environment in another comment, but to answer the piece about what you can do as compared to Windows, Linux can do the vast majority of all your daily tasks. There are a couple of big sticking points, generally.
Microsoft products, i.e. Microsoft Office. There are alternatives available in the Linux space that do a great job and are good enough for probably 95-98% of people, but there are cases where they don’t quuiiiite match up. Formatting PowerPoints, for example. You may save a *.pptx from LibreOffice and a colleague will open it in Microsoft PowerPoint and it doesn’t look the same at all.
The other major software suite that keeps people in Windows is Adobe. Photoshop? Lightroom? Premiere? Not available on Linux. Again, there are alternatives, but they’re never quite as good. I say this as a photographer that runs 100% Linux all the time, I miss my photo editing software! I used Capture One, but the same principle applies. There’s no Linux release, and you can’t get it running on Linux no matter how much you tinker.
The third biggest sticking point is gaming. You can game on Linux. It’s better now than ever. I run AAA brand new releases on my PC, and again I’m 100% Linux. BUT! It does frequently require a little more elbow grease to get working than people are used to, and often times you can never get it to work 100% as well as it would in Windows.
Sorry for the big wall of text. But finally I just want to say, none of this is to dissuade you from putting Linux on those machine. Quite the contrary! I want you to be aware of what the pitfalls may be, so you can look out for them. I’d hate for you to go in expecting everything to be 1:1 with Windows, only for something to not work and it feel like a bad experience in the end.
Puppy Linux is made for old machines and generally just works. You can boot it up on a live USB and see what you think. Lots of flavours to choose from.
My favorite very light is peppermintOS, I think you may have to go back to version 10 for 32 bit though.
Void’s xfce desktop release is awesome for old hardware but it takes a bit to setup.
I vote Ubuntu, I started as a complete noob about 10 years ago with them and at first it was frustrating and tough, but now everything is just done for me, software updates, sure! I all the sudden want to want a windows-type application, sure! I love that it comes with Firefox, which from what I’ve read should make your family safer from the initial launch of the browser, no matter where the site they want to reach.
I recommend arch linux. Also most desktop environment are light enough to run on old hardware. Just disable file content indexing
Browser choice is probably going to make just as much difference as distro choice. Modern browsers kinda need at least 1 GB to be usable, ideally more. Depends what you do with it of course.
Try Pale Moon, Falkon and Konqueror.
In my experience, palemoon struggles a lot with modern JavaScript-bloated sites and becomes much slower to use. My suggestion is to use 32bit firefox.
For a more “friendly flavored” distro, MX Linux is Debian-based and comes with a bunch of quality of life tools
MX Linux seconded. It’s available in 32-bit versions, too.
I haven’t used it on a machine with less than 4GB though, but it runs well on an old Dell laptop from 2009.
I’d suggest Debian with LXDE, which, from my personal experience, works pretty fine on low-end computers. You can replace LXDE with your choice of Windows Managers for an even lighter system, but that might be a little hard if you’ve never used Linux before.
I’ve used Debian on an old netbook with an Intel Atom and onyl 2GB RAM. The experience wasn’t so bad but web browsing was definitely a pain. Video calling and watching YouTube (Firefox) was very sluggish and annoying to deal with. It’s fine for working with documents and watching low resolution videos locally but that’s about it.
I’ve also tried antiX but a lot of the defaults were annoying. If you (or your family members) can deal with it, then it’s probably the best lightweight Linux distro out there.
are there any linux distros that might work becasue im a noob who uses windows so im very lost. any tips or suggestions or something would be great.
In this case, I recommend just leaving your family members to do their own thing. From my experience, it is very hard to manage other people’s Linux issues if you don’t have decent knowledge on it yourself. If they don’t want to upgrade, that’s their problem. Not yours.
Did you use a 64 bit version? Running at least a 32 bit browser makes using the internet viable with 2gb.
AntiX is quite good on older hardware but beware of the fact they don’t use systemd. Nice effort to try and use newer init services but a lot of things really depend on systemd being installed.
WattOS (which uses systemd) is also very performant on old rigs but it needs more tweaking OOTB I’d say.
