Additional option: Debian Stable is fine for older desktops and laptops, at least as far back as including mobile Core 2 Duo. Preferably with at least a couple GB RAM and SSD.
It works even better if you disable Wayland and some of the other desktop infrastructure stuff, and use a power-user window manager like around XMonad or i3wm. But the stock Debian Gnome-y desktop performs OK too.
This also fits with using Debian Stable by default everywhere. There's little "scrappy small team" efficiencies when you default to having the same thing on your workstation/laptop, your servers, your RasPis projects, old utility laptops, etc.
I'm a fan Debian Stable everywhere too - it's likely to have most types of recent software packaged, and the likelihood of success on any arbitrary hardware is very high.
If Linux isn't a requirement, OpenBSD is super lightweight as well.
That's what got me to switch completly from Windows to Linux.
I started by installing a Debian Stable with Xfce on an old Core 2 Duo, then I switched to Testing and slowly got ride of everything from Xfce to i3wm, dunst, jgmenu...
Seeing that my old hardware was more fast, fun and just as useful (even for games) that the recent hardware on a slimed down Windows LTSC was a revelation.
I also run Debian on all of my machines, either Stable or Testing. It runs fine on older machines, at least up to Core 2 Duo (64-bit).
The advantage is that Debian has a very large package repository, is actively maintained (with security updates) and is often supported by externally packaged software.
I agree on everything except when you mention Gnome: it requires accelerated graphics that your old PC might miss (TFA mentions quite old Pentium-era machines).
It is almost impossible to run anything modern on Pentium era machines, and not just because of speed. Even Tiny Core Linux states the absolute minimum of 32/48 MB of memory to be able to boot core+busybox and core+busybox+graphical screen, respectively. These are substantial Pentium era specifications. 128 MB is recommended, which moves the point a couple of years later, and, of course, a bigger number would help.
Frankly, something that resembles more or less modern desktop with some multimedia capabilities, and more or less modern browser to be used to look something up on the Web starts much later, at 2+ core CPU comparable to a fast Core 2 Duo, and 2 gigs of RAM, which is not outside of range of many general purpose distributions. (Yes, quite a lot can be done on a fast single core CPU with just 1 GB, but there are gotchas and pitfalls.)
It's sad that the 'light-weight-ness' of a distro seems to superficially only be measured on how much RAM it uses, instead of CPU load or disk I/O which have a much bigger impact on how snappy an OS feels than RAM, as most linux distros don't use that much RAM anyway to make a difference once you launch a memory hog like Chrome, but they can hit the CPU and disk hard enough to make a dent on performance, especially on older systems with HDD and slow CPUs.
Yes, this is greatly increased on older CPUs that aren't that rich in cores, thus the current heavy multi-processing takes an heavy toll on them, basically why threads used to be favoured back when they were modern.
I agree... so if you use the GUI, the window manager has a lot to do with it (hence the other posters comment about wayland). The author also notes the size of the download/distro, which is not equal to install size. If you wanted to go really crazy, perhaps install gentoo and only put in the packages you absolutely need?
I still find this site terribly useful, and parse through distros probably once a month. https://distrowatch.com/
Fun as a hobby, but power draw of older computers is unlikely to make using them financially or environmentally friendly long term. One can get a stick PC for $100 or a Linux capable Chromebook for $200 and these will be faster and vastly more power efficient compared to old hardware.
For explicit hobby use, I prefer tinkering with software common at the time these systems were new. Then I get to play with different UI and some apps/games/peripherals which do not work with emulators, or are better on the real thing.
"Newer old hardware" might be different, but it's also less likely to need special distros. I have a 2013 Macbook Air running Sonoma thanks to Open Core Legacy Patcher. Everything works fine with patched stock OS. But practicality of Pentium 4 is a stretch.
Using inefficient old electronics is significantly more environmentally friendly compared to scraping it and using something new.
The vast majority of energy used and environment damage caused by computers happen when they are manufactured. The lifetime energy use afterwards is a tiny fraction.
I would be very surprised if this was true with a compute stick as a replacement for a 100 watt old desktop with hardware that does not implement proper power management. Just how bad is compute stick manufacturing process?
it holds true within the same class of hardware, and not only for computers.
the carbon footprint of producing a new car can hardly be offset through the efficiency of a new one. substitute an old pickup truck for a new three-door ev, totally worth it for the environment.
No complaints, but I mostly use mine for web/video/e-mail/casual image editing. I do have an even older 17 inch Macbook Pro that I keep on Mojave (using another toolkit from dosdude1) to play old 32 bit Mac games.
It's also not a given that post Big Sur versions would be even slower, Apple's optimization efforts can fluctuate release by release.
Got an older MBP in my house, older OS. Got a warning on that that we won't get newer Chrome. It's almost frozen in time. Netflix will stop working soon I've heard. As long as Jellyfin works we'll keep it.
I have family members who buy new computers every few years just so they can play web-based games on Facebook with reasonable performance. This is quite understandable given how poorly the Facebook website performs even with modern browsers with modern JavaScript engines but on older hardware. This IMHO is one of the dark side of JavaScript -- it may 'run everywhere' but it certainly doesn't perform well everywhere. It does not matter other sites work (e.g. HN) work just fine on older hardware, the Joe Public just want Facebook, Gmail, etc to work.
> The real bottleneck is a web browser that can render the modern web and there is no real solution for that.
I think ChromeOS solves that problem quite smartly, by starting the bare necessities to launch the browser and nothing else. No more moving parts, just the web, which is what 99% of computer use seems to be these days anyway.
ChromeOS Flex seems to work pretty well for giving old laptops a second life. It won't run on your Pentium II but there are plenty of computers out there that'll work great.
With Microsoft's plans for Windows 12, I can imagine a cloud-based Windows that you can use any old laptop with. As long as you have decent WiFi and a thin client loaded, you'll end up with laptops where hardware h264 decoding will matter more than CPU power and RAM.
But note, if OpenBSD is installed on a "very" lightweight PC, you may need to disable re-linking of the kernel :) I thought I saw issues with this in the mailing lists if less than 1G memory.
I think NetBSD is the champion with OpenBSD a rather close 2nd.
I did install pkgsrc on Ubuntu to get around snap but building anything took such a long time even on modern hardware. But that was building all the dependencies from scratch. After that it should take less time.
Retelling distro descriptions like this, whether by human, or by text generator, can only be useful to absolute noobs who've never heard about any of those. It tells nothing about the quirks of actually running those systems daily.
I would advise to go in the opposite direction. Choose an LTS release of a popular distribution, a DE that is not designed with transparencies and shadows in mind, and a software-oriented window manager if you have an anemic card released before the era of hardware compositing in desktops. If it works fine, enjoy using supported software, then test zram, schedulers, spectre+meltdown-enabling kernel patches, and other options to boost performance if you like.
By the way, everyone knows that SSD is the first component needed by a slow PC. A second one is a dedicated GPU instead of integrated one. Even if it's completely mediocre, it still has plenty of VRAM and more than enough bandwidth for display controller to waste (unlike your main memory). And any kind of hardware acceleration integrated GPU pretends to do natively usually seems to result in 2× or 3× more memory transfers than needed to get things on screen.
I didn't mean 3D acceleration at all. Integrated video cards, especially older ones, compete with CPU for memory access constantly, and take some of its bandwidth. The effect is amplified by higher resolutions of modern monitors. The bigger data traffic to screen (multimedia, compositing), the jerkier the interface. So when you encounter Intel GMA, just put inside any compatible video card from a garbage bin instead of trying to gain performance by simplifying the visuals.
Hobby projects on super old / free hardware was/is fun. I remember using dumpster desktops as a student. I could SSH to my home PC from school. Ran a webserver. Even wrote C code to generate HTML for a website to host my photos. Fun times.
All my current desktops are ~8 year old corporate cast-offs.
Yes, support for 386s was dropped near version 6 I believe. You could use such a version, or if you want a Unix-like on a 8088 or 80286 without proper memory protection, use ELKS. Although for a proper experience, I would just use DOS and forget about multitasking. DOS is blazing fast on a 386.
Of course, the real question is what to do with such machines once you get an OS running on them.
For older desktops, soon it will be "anything not running Wayland" as I don't own a discrete GPU that works with Wayland (my 7 year old laptop with Intel HD Graphics 520 runs it fine, but any ATI/AMD card too old to run AMDGPU is not supported.
Very happy Slax user (recovery from USB stick only, not as a daily driver). Works great on older laptops, even from USB booting is pretty quick and the (quite basic, but very functional) UI is pretty snappy. It has both 64 and 32 bit distributions, and uses apt as a package manager so it's easy to pick up if you know ubuntu/debian (and easy to search online for packages, compared to less used package managers).
Would definitely suggest to anyone trying to squeeze another few years out of an old machine.
And in what way does the one cause the other? Slackware Linux 3 was about that size on disk and it ran perfectly well on a machine with 4MiB of main memory.
Can anyone recommend a benchmark suite that can profile desktop performance across these old distributions?
I find performance heavily dependent on specific quirks eg puppy Linux running from ram (great), zero optimisation of the woeful gma950 graphics found in old netbooks (deal breaker)
Geekbench does some pretty comparable CPU + GPU prowess tests on multiple operating systems. I'm not sure how comparable the Geekbench compute scores are between platforms (Android vs Mac vs PC) because Android uses Vulkan+EGL, Mac uses Metal, and PC uses CUDA/Vulkan/OpenGL, but comparing within the same category the performance comparisons seem right.
You need some modern level of hardware acceleration for that, though, and platforms like gma950 just don't have the hardware to run that stuff. llvmpipe can fix a lot of compatibility issues but your CPU and GPU score will end up very close together.
I've got Linux Mint XFCE on an old ToughBook and it runs great. Very low resource usage, both RAM and CPU usage. Boots fast, very snappy response times... have liked it a lot more than Pop!_OS which I have been using on a ThinkPad with exactly the same CPU, RAM and equivalent SSD (very coincidentally). I mean, a lot of that is of course the WM/DE. XFCE is very lightweight. :)
I don't really see the point with this. Running Linux is not a goal but a convenient way to load and run apps concurrently. What apps do they plan to run if even Gnome won't work on such machines?
I can repurpose even an 8088 if needed, but what will I do with it? Getting Linux to run just for the sake won't be enough to the end user if he can't browse the modern web anyway.
I tried Linux Lite[0] in a VM, and there was an awful bug where after setting up a disk encryption password, it wouldn't decrypt when I went to login, so I just abandoned my little experiment. I really should submit a bug report about that.
I have been using Arch Linux+XFCE since around 2010. My previous personal PC was 10 year old Pentium 4 and with the fastest (SATA) SSD the machine could support, and everyday usage felt faster than many modern peers at the time.
OTOH, I always wondered how big difference would it have with LXDE, IceWM, MATE or Enlightenment instead.
I am using an 7 years old HP laptop as primary machine and it's work like a charm with Debian and LXDE.
I just replace the disk with a faster SSD.
I will not buy a new laptop anymore, when this laptop will die I will probably an used Thinkpad. For my usage (coding, SSH, browsing and ham radio support) it's enough.
I honestly think these things are often used by people just to make themselves feel better. The amount of difference that a full fledged DE like Gnome or KDE use it mostly just RAM and its 2023 I mean how old and how less ram do people actually have even in "old" machines.
I think unless your are SERIOUSLY limited there is really no reason to use some minimalist DE (OS) and it all comes down to DE mostly, so I would if anything rather use some very established Linux like Lubuntu, Arch with a smaller DE over all these niche specialized minimalist distros.
I have a feeling everyone and their grandma starts a linux distro and sells it based on a screenshot on how the default desktop looks and how much ram is used after boot. There are like 1000 Linux distros based on Ubuntu and I think most of them make no sense. Official flavors do make sense Kubuntu/Lubuntu/... I never got Mint, clinging so hard on Gnome 2. There are plenty of gnome 3 extensions that make things exactly as you like it. I use Material Shell and its the best DE experience I ever had, even though its pretty buggy. I am exited for the authors new project veshell https://github.com/free-explorers/veshell a Wayland compositor that does the same thing without Gnome.
My daily Linux was PopOS but I switched back to Ubuntu because of reliability issues. Ubuntu LTS is just fine but if you are looking for a lightweight Linux go with Debian.
Defined as what? Even a bottom-of-the-line NUC with a dual core Celeron and only half the memory populated, using a 4GiB SO-DIMM even though at this point those cost more than 8GiB modules, would be more than plenty to run any popular distro.
It works even better if you disable Wayland and some of the other desktop infrastructure stuff, and use a power-user window manager like around XMonad or i3wm. But the stock Debian Gnome-y desktop performs OK too.
This also fits with using Debian Stable by default everywhere. There's little "scrappy small team" efficiencies when you default to having the same thing on your workstation/laptop, your servers, your RasPis projects, old utility laptops, etc.