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?
Think of it as Windows 7 in terms of functionality but with a Windows Vista/XP GUI.
That said, your CPU’s performance will increase noticebly on Linux.
Mint is a great distro for people who want their PCs to “just work.” Very little to no tinkering past initial setup, it has a solid base and won’t need daily or even weekly updates, you should experience very little in the way of hardware issues – especially since you’re working with older hardware.
Mint is based on Ubuntu but has been largely “de-canonical-ified” which I feel is important, especially if you’re looking for performance. But that basis in Ubuntu means a wide, wide, wide array of software available to you will little to no fussing about.
XFCE is a perfect choice for older hardware (and older people, lol) because it’s simple, but familiar. It doesn’t try new things, it’s not fancy, it’s not innovative in the design space. It follows the design paradigm most folks are used to. Task bar, start button, desktop, done. That’s not to say it’s ugly or outdated, it can still be a gorgeous desktop environment. But it doesn’t overload you with bells and whistles no one needs and it sips resources compared to, say, Gnome or KDE.
Linux Mint with XFCE is also my vote.
I think Pop OS is a great place to start. I haven’t personally used it but Linux Mint is commonly recommended to people who have only used windows before, it tries to have a similar UI experience.
Linux can do most things windows can, except it’s free. The best thing about Linux is the depositories, unlike windows you rarely download apps from the Internet, instead you can download them from a repository. In Pop OS it’s called Pop shop, it’s different depending on which OS you are using.
It has everything you may want to use - LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird …
Some programs aren’t supported for Linux but you can find replacement. For me it has 100% of tools that I need.
When you go from windows to mint - they feel similar (UI), but some things are different (installing programs, settings…)
It is just solid out of the box experience. You don’t have to customise it to be usable, complete suite of programs and it is stable.
Some of really light distros for old PCs are missing lot of these things but you may need to explore those options if it doesn’t run well.
There’s very little windows can do, which linux can’t also. The difference will be in how, and how easily.
Often the answer is just “install the same program, and just use it like normal”. Other times, you have to go out of your way to get something running using wine.
For this, bottles is a GUI manager that can make life a lot easier.
Something that uses XFCE is a really good starting point for weak hardware. And mint is a good option for someone new to linux. It is based on ubuntu, and there is plenty of info online on how do things on ubuntu.
It also has good default repos, meaning you’ll be able to find and install most software you might need, without having to start fiddling with custom software repos.
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.
Anything with Xfce or MATE, such as Mint Xfce or MATE
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.
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.
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.
My favorite very light is peppermintOS, I think you may have to go back to version 10 for 32 bit though.
There are some distros out there intended for low power machines, but usually you’ll be fine installing whatever distro you want and using a lightweight desktop environment for it. Any distro running a DE like Xfce or LxQt should feel pretty decent on older hardware.
Not a Linux power user, still very much new although I’ve done a bit of distrohopping before.
I loaded Fedora with KDE on an old laptop from 2012-13ish last weekend. Been having a good, smooth run with it so far so that’s where my vote goes. However, the memory specs you indicated for your family’s hardware might be tough.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.
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.
since you’re a noob, idk if this will be very helpful to you, but
i used debian with awesomewm on an old pentium 4 from 2004-2005 and it was pretty fast! like a modern low-end computer. but you’d have to configure it to be noob-friendly/have patient users. i don’t mind it cuz i enjoy tinkering, but i imagine it could be very frustrating for other people.
i’d give you my awesomewm config (i configured it to be super minimal, but also familiar, as i was trying to create a desktop environment that could be used on older machines), but unfortunately my desktop no longer has a power supply, so i can’t access it :')
I’d suggest Linux mint Debian edition, at least for the 32bit machine. Many distros have stopped supporting 32bit lately.
It should be fairly user friendly.
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.
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
