
Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with? - bananicorn
I just got myself a used Fujitsu Lifebook E8410 - the thing&#x27;s around 6 years old, maybe older.
I&#x27;m aiming to use it to learn C and wanted to install a gnu&#x2F;linux on it, but I don&#x27;t know where to start. A gui would be nice though, maybe not even a DE, I might just put i3 on it.<p>I&#x27;ve used debian before, but I&#x27;m open for any lightweiht distro with support for older hardware.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear your recommendations and&#x2F;or warnings.
======
lovelearning
I suggest Lubuntu 16.04 (which I have running on an even older, lower spec
laptop) or even the slightly more polished Xubuntu 16.04. They are standard
Ubuntus with just different DEs. Both are far more lightweight compared to
Unity. Good docs, lots of useful forums out there.

Puppy Linux is another good one, but it's quite different and finding help
when it's needed is a bit of a problem.

I don't know if you know this already, but you can try out any number of
distros non-destructively. Just write a downloaded image distro to a pen
drive, boot off it and select "try without installing"[1]. This is how I tried
out a number of distros and settled on Lubuntu.

[1]:
[https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/InstallingLubuntu](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/InstallingLubuntu)

~~~
bananicorn
I've already run puppy linux from a thumb drive on it, but I'm not too keen on
the whole OS running in RAM, even though it worked really smoothly.

I'll give xububtu or lubuntu a try though :) Edit: fixed typo

~~~
brudgers
Puppy can be installed to the hard drive. I did it three or four years ago on
a Satellite 1800-s203. [1] I even compiled the latest Emacs from source (not
quick on an 800mhz Celeron and 192mb of RAM.)

[1]:
[http://support.toshiba.com/support/staticContentDetail?conte...](http://support.toshiba.com/support/staticContentDetail?contentId=638115&isFromTOCLink=false)

------
swalladge
Arch would be a nice choice for your description - the base install comes with
a minimal selection of software, so you can easily add what you want without
there being any bloat. However it doesn't come with a graphical installer. A
derived distro like Antegos with a graphical installer might be a good choice
otherwise.

But, as always, this sort of thing is highly subjective, and there is no 'best
solution'. My recommendation would be to try out a few different ones and see
which one you like. Even a distro generally labelled on the heavyweight side
will run perfectly on old hardware, especially if you install their 'minimal'
or 'server' option (and add the software you want on top).

Remember, that apart from the package management system and some underlying
system choices, most distros are fairly similar to use on the surface (unless
you plan on using it as a server - then you'll find large differences between
ubuntu based and redhat/fedora based distros).

Having said that, if you install a desktop distro like ubuntu it can be
difficult to switch DE's since the configuration is integrated so much.

~~~
bananicorn
I'm a bit hesitant to try arch, since it seems quite daunting to start with
such a trimmed down distro - and yet I really like the idea.

The hardest part will probably be setting up the wireless connection, and
getting the WM set up. Do you think arch is suitable for a relative beginner?

~~~
dnt404-1
I would suggest Antergos based on Arch, in that case. You can select xfce as
the starting de, and then install wm on top of it, or individually. You will
get a working distro quite easily, and after that you can customize as much as
you want, without having to go through the base Arch distro installation,
which requires you to follow the excellent Arch wiki guides. I installed
Antergos on a 4 years old laptop that I got recently, and it works fine
seamlessly.

~~~
gremlinsinc
agreed I love antergos, my favorite distro by far, esp. with i3 window
manager.

------
brudgers
Random advice from the internet.

It looks like that model shipped with 1GB of RAM and 1 empty slot but is
upgradable to 4GB. [1] My advice would be to upgrade the RAM if it practical
[2]. This would make just about all distros practical. It's probably worth
considering a cheap SSD as well...it can always be installed in another system
later.

Of course, those are suggestions that involve spending a little money and the
reason is that I would generally recommend standard Ubuntu. Not because it is
better but because it has its own StackExhange site for getting help:
[https://askubuntu.com/](https://askubuntu.com/). For _me_ AskUbuntu is the
killer app that trumps pretty much every other consideration. That's not to
say that I don't use ArchWiki and other resources (like man pages) but the Q&A
format focused on Ubuntu can provide more focused advice and solutions. Ubuntu
also feels more beginner friendly than some other distributions of similar
size, the defaults (arguments about Unity and sysmd aside) are relatively sane
and there is a large selection of binary packages so the joys and sorrows of
compiling from source can be approached with on gently graded slope. Worry
not, there's enough sources of WTF and frustration for someone new to Linux
without working with source.

Good luck.

[1]: [https://www.cnet.com/products/fujitsu-
lifebook-e8410-15-4-co...](https://www.cnet.com/products/fujitsu-
lifebook-e8410-15-4-core-2-duo-t7500-vista-business-1-gb-ram-100-gb-hdd-
series/specs/)

[2]: US ebay shows a 2GB stick of PC-2 5300 can be purchased for ~$4.00
including shipping and 3GB is enough to make "mainstream" Linux distros an
option.

~~~
bananicorn
Actually, I might be able to use the ram from my "old" laptop, which has just
died a week ago, so I think I'll give it at least a try. Thanks!

------
chipmonkey75
I'm going to throw an alternate thought out there just for you to chew on...
try Slackware first. The common rhetoric is that Slackware is difficult to
work with and not for the weak of heart.

That has absolutely been my experience too (I still have my 1995 Infomagic
Slackware CD... the horror.)

But are YOU the weak of heart? Perhaps not, coming here to ask such questions.
And, IMHO, what you learn from fighting with a more raw linux distribution
like Slackware is actually a useful learning tool. You can learn a lot about
drivers and hardware systems by having to fight to get them to work.

And as soon as you get sick and tired of it, install something else that
someone more forgiving has already mentioned. :-)

------
enzolovesbacon
I recommend you try Fedora.

Even though Ubuntu is beginner-friendly at first sight, in very short time
you'll see that all the benefit you're supposed to get from a community are
actually hacks to solve things like: GUI issues with Unity, some services not
starting, services crashing randomly, and so on.

Fedora is often taken as somewhat unstable because of its fast release cycle
and lack of a long-term support release, but, in my experience, it has proven
itself to be very reliable and stable for my workflow.

~~~
noahdesu
I second this. I've been running Fedora on my MacBook Air, and all my desktops
for around a year with no problems, except the occasional wifi issue.

------
brendaningram
Firstly, what I use and where I'm coming from: I've distro hopped in
VirtualBox (so I can experiment) for more than 5 years, trying out every
distro I can find. I currently run Debian with i3 natively / on the host
machine. It certainly classifies as "lightweight", running in not much more
than 100MB of RAM. It's blazingly fast on my 32GB i7 desktop or my 10 year old
laptop.

Secondly, to answer your question "What Linux distro should I start with?" If
you've used Debian before, and you know what i3 is, you aren't a Linux novice.
So I would recommend staying with the Debian/i3 combination. It will run
perfectly fine on the 6 year old laptop you mention.

I think the strongest piece of advice I could give you is "choose one
distro/DE combination and stick to it - when the use of that environment
becomes second nature you'll have more mental capacity to focus on and learn
other things (like C)"

There was a mention of Fedora down below, and I have to give this a big thumbs
up. Every time I use Fedora, I find it "just works". Problems with
Mono/MonoDevelop on Ubuntu? Works perfectly on Fedora. Problems with
GOPATH/PATH with Visual Studio Code on Debian? Works perfectly on Fedora. If
it wasn't for the fact that I've spent the last 10 years becoming familiar
with the Debian/Ubuntu way of doing things, I would swap to Fedora in a
heartbeat. And to be honest, every time I look at the Fedora community, I just
have this gut feeling that it's the right place to be.

P.S. I wrote up a bit of an article about something similar last year. If
you're interested, you can find it at [https://brendaningram.com/article/ram-
usage-of-various-linux...](https://brendaningram.com/article/ram-usage-of-
various-linux-desktop-environments/)

------
ogfomk
I have been using Linux since 1999. I currently use Linux Mint on two
different systems. If you go to
[https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php](https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php)
you can choose from the modern Cinnamon, Mate and KDE to the legacy supporting
XFCE.

I currently use Cinnamon on an i5 Samsung laptop and I use XFCE on an eMachine
that is ten years old. %99.9 of Ubuntu packages will also run on Linux Mint.
The desktops for XFCE and Cinnamon / Mate are easy to navigate. There is great
support and a large community.

There is also a rolling distribution using Debian which is a distro that does
not need to be upgraded since it is constantly getting updates. Does not run
Ubuntu packages, but you will learn better development skills and this is what
powers Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
[https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php](https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php)
For an older Laptop this may not be a good choice.

If you want to focus on development and at the same time have a system that
can handle modern stuff like Netflix, LibreOffice and Google Chrome then try
Linux Mint XFCE.

------
Mathnerd314
NixOS is great for development, particularly C since C doesn't have a
language-specific package manager / build system.
[http://nixos.org/](http://nixos.org/)

Although it's going down:
[https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity](https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity)
If you want a distro on the upswing you should instead look at GuixSD; it
emphasizes the "GNU" part of GNU/Linux.
[https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/](https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/)

~~~
Drakonis
Please don't use distrowatch as a metric, it is utterly useless as a general
usage metric due to it considering only within itself and not as a general
statistic.

~~~
Mathnerd314
Well, if you have a better one, I'm all ears. I guess google trends could
work, but that shows Kali Linux as absurdly popular compared to everything
else.

------
peterburke
Get a few USB disks and try the most popular ones. Don't mess around with
virtual machines, a USB disk costs less than 12$ these days. You can start a
complete Linux system from USB.

If you need to work immediately: Manjaro XFCE, Ubuntu Mate, Fedora.

If you have a lot of time: Gentoo, Linux From Scratch, Arch, Slackware.

------
vacri
If you're not familiar with linux much, the best distros to start with are the
ones with the largest communities. That means more support for edge-case
stuff.

If you've used Debian before, stick with it. Your system's specs are fine; you
don't need a 'lightweight' distro for it. [1]

Debian has a couple more warts than Ubuntu, as the latter is more user-
friendly by design, but Debian is 'cleaner'. You'll also have an easier time
if you use Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS releases (and just upgrade necessary
packages). 'Rolling distros' are more up-to-date in general, but they can
break on you (fine if you don't mind fiddling, but annoying if you just want
to get on with stuff). Rolling distros become less painful as you skill up in
unix-ese.

[1] actually, depends on the ram of the system. the CPU is fine, but I misread
max supported ram as current ram. If you've got 4GB, you're fine. If you've
got 1GB, go for a lightweight dekstop (and stay away from modern websites).

------
sigjuice
If your aim is to learn C and if the computer already has Windows on it, you
might consider installing a C compiler.

~~~
madamelic
Not even Python works well on Windows.

I was constantly having to tweak and install things to make libraries compile
without error. The second I went to OS X or Ubuntu, everything worked out of
the box.

~~~
sigjuice
My take on learning C is that you just need a C compiler and your programs are
simple enough that you do not need anything from the system besides reading
and writing file handles.

------
santoriv
I use Arch but if you are starting out I would recommend Ubuntu. It's probably
got the most youtube videos, online articles, troubleshooting questions
online. This make things a bit easier. For example, you mention i3 - probably
the best i3 tutorial on youtube is running ubuntu. ->
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4)

------
peterwwillis
I recently put a "lightweight Ubuntu-based Linux distro" on my gf's
underpowered laptop. It really sucked. Hardware support was shot, software
selection is limiting, and in general it's just not set up the way the rest of
us expect. Get a standard distro, even if it might not be the ultra-fastest
build out there. All the help forum search results you will find are based on
the standard distros, and this will make it easier to fix problems and learn
quickly.

You honestly start with something incredibly common like Debian, Ubuntu (both
mostly the same but with important differences in usability) or Fedora. The
simplest way to try different distros is to make /home a separate partition
for your user files; everything else is disposable.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, try LFS. If you want to see a
stripped-down but not "minimalist" distro, try Slackware. If you want to
install lots of distros and try them out one by one, use QEMU, VMware Player,
VirtualBox, etc and install each one and play with it, but hardware-specific
changes you'll only find by installing it natively.

You are actually _incredibly lucky_ to be using a 6 year old machine. The
newer the machine, the less Linux support there is for it. I recently got back
to Linux with some modern laptops and it was a friggin' nightmare to get
everything working. One distro's installer didn't properly support the naming
convention for a hard drive controller. A bunch of the media keys aren't
supported. Getting hybrid graphics to work took days. Apparently my wifi card
has unfixable problems with 802.11n networks in Linux. And I am still unable
to connect to a bluetooth headset. Stick to the old hardware, try different
web browsers until you find one that won't crash with only 1GB of RAM, and
have fun!

------
stevekemp
Everybody will present their favourite distribution as the "best", regardless
of knowing nothing about your skill-set, or personal preferences.

Perhaps you like a GUI, perhaps you like to choose all your software.

I'd suggest instead that you pick whichever distribution you know "local"
people are using. Nothing beats having somebody nearby to help/chat with, if
you do have problems.

------
CyberFonic
I find Alpine Linux to be very good on low-spec systems. The package manager
is similar to Debian's. It has a very comprehensive packages collection. I
mainly use it on low-spec servers so I don't install GUI - can't comment on
how good they are. I prefer to use Ubuntu on my desktop - but that is pretty
well spec'd out.

------
bananicorn
A small update on my current situation: I've successfully(?) installed arch,
but I'm still setting everything up, but the internet is accessible without
problems. I'm struggling with the video drivers, but that's mostly since I
never had to install any on linux. I'm also learning a LOT.

At the same time I'm tempted to try out almost all distros mentioned here
(even gentoo, to really get the hang of compiling and makefiles), but I'll
probably try and set up Arch first, until I'm happy with it and then maybe
mess around with other distros on another partition, or in a VM (but probably
on another PC). Obviously armed with all the knowledge gained in the process.

Thank you all so much for your suggestions, and I hope I'll get around to
trying them all one day :)

Until then, I'll continue configuring (and maybe borking) my Arch install and
enjoy the discussion taking place here.

PS: The arch documentation is AMAZING.

------
hackermailman
For development these days I use generic Debian stable install with guix
package manager. You can install a dozen different versions of gcc if you want
and isolate your project from the rest of the machine with guix environment
[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-
devel/2015-10/msg009...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-
devel/2015-10/msg00916.html)

Fujitsu Lifebook E8410 has Intel graphics and Atheros wireless, it's also
perfect for running a BSD. They are simple systems to learn and use,
especially OpenBSD where all configuration is in one directory. Here's all you
need to know as a casual user in one post
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797171)

------
haidrali
Start with Ubuntu latest version, Ubuntu is easy to use and has large
community to dig into in case of bugs

------
jamesjguthrie
I don't know the specs of your laptop but if it will run Windows 10 then just
install the Windows Subsystem for Linux then you can have bash, gcc, all the
gnu tools, etc. right there without relying on Linux as your OS.

------
ythn
Xubuntu! I've tried many flavors of Ubuntu, and Xubuntu is my favorite.

------
navbehl
I would suggest Manjaro. It is based on Arch and has a GUI installer. My
experience with Arch's package manager (pacman) has been far better that
Ubuntu's.

------
macscam
Ubuntu.

~~~
flukus
I agree, simple safe choice. There a various lightweight versions if the base
version doesn't work well on the machine.

~~~
geerlingguy
And, annoyingly to those who prefer other distros, one major selling point for
*ubuntu distros is that nearly every aspect of setup/configuration/adjustment
is documented somewhere, be it a blog post, wiki, stack exchange, forum post,
etc.

For certain less popular desktop distros (e.g. slackware, arch, and to a
certain extent fedora, debian, etc.) there are lots of little things where you
find some decent documentation, but you have to know how to adapt it to your
particular OS version. Things like that kill a beginner's curiosity, because
in the beginning, you just want to get some random thing working, not debug
linux kernel versions and package repositories!

------
ilovetux
Just my two cents, if you plan on employment in an enterprise setting I would
go with Centos as that will get you used to working with RHEL which in my
experience is the most commonly deployed distro in production environments. If
it's for fun I would go with Fedora. Finally if you have a project in mind and
your project needs compatibility with various hardware platforms I would go
with vanilla Ubuntu.

------
IC3BEAST
I personally really like ubuntuGnome!
[http://ubuntugnome.org](http://ubuntugnome.org) Ubuntu as always is really
easy to use and has wide ranging support. All without that terrible unity
front end. Mind you the next major release of Ubuntu will be use Gnome so this
distro is mostly pointless now.

------
giancarlostoro
Ubuntu is good, just pick a flavor you like. I currently enjoy Ubuntu Budgie,
which is a new official spin on Ubuntu. If you want something different that
is truly worthwhile check out openSUSE, it has more packages than a lot of
distros I've seen and they do a lot to contribute to other Linux
distributions.

------
limeblack
Try out Tiny Core Linux. You can run it on almost anything. It is crazy fast
and can boot entirely to RAM. It isn't as full featured as other OSs but it
can boot of pretty much anything including floppy disks. If you want something
more full featured I would recommend Debian.

------
nachexnachex
Since your intention is to learn the C language, I'd recommend Gentoo.
Building is at the heart of the distro, so you'll be piggybacking learning how
deploying and installing works, what are the challenges of bootstrapping, and
compile flags as you go.

------
bananicorn
I found this site here[0], that should come in handy for testing different
distros:

[0][http://livecdlist.com/](http://livecdlist.com/)

------
BrandoElFollito
I would start with gentoo. This is a horrible, horrendous distro to actually
_work_ with (I will make a few friends here...) but there is nothing better to
_understand_ how Linux works.

You have to painfully install every bit of the system and you gain fantastic
knowledge on the way.

Then, once it is installed, you can delete it and install something which
works, namely Ubuntu (which is obviously the best system on earth). I do not
know for desktops, I only use Linux on servers.

Source : I forced all my admins through that 15 to 20 years ago and that still
talk to me.

~~~
pravula
Slackware is right up there with Gentoo.

------
peternicky
I love Debian, it feels "natural" to me :)

------
crispytx
Puppy Linux kicks ass at reviving old computers.

------
thebigspacefuck
peppermint!

------
bbcbasic
Just an idea, install an 'easy' OS like Windows or Ubuntu. Then try out
different distros in VMs. Once happy make the one your like your main PC
distro, if you like.

~~~
CyberFonic
Wouldn't running distros in VMs be difficult if the notebook has minimal RAM
and a relatively slow CPU? AFAIK only paravirtualized kernels would run with
acceptable performance and not all distros provide that option.

