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Comment by lovelearning | Hacker News Reader

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

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I run XFCE Fedora, but I've used all of the 'buntu derivatives. I think Lubuntu/Xubuntu are great suggestions. The Lightweight Desktop Environments are less 'convoluted' in my opinion, in the sense that the just seem to work the way people expect a computer to work. (Think Windows 98 vs. using OS X or Win 10).

Ubuntu is a good choice because Apt and dpkg are both easier to use then DNF/YUM, and Ubuntu has basically everything in its repositories. On top of that, the package groups make things really easy to install if you want to try another desktop environment, etc. Plus most of the help you will find when you Google linux problems are from Ubuntu derivatives, which is another good reason to choose one when starting out.

Yes. I've been hopping around on too many distros in the past and always come back to LTS versions of xubuntu. Everything else just creates a lot of unanticipated pain or annoyance after some usage. Lubuntu would be the next best, if you really can't get xubuntu to run properly... But I would give xubuntu a serious try first, as it is so much more of a proper OS. Shouldnt be too far from lubuntu performance-wise if turning off some of the window animations etc.

Lubuntu and Xubuntu are also good and easy to use. Puppy Linux is great for hobby but I think the idea of learning to develop would be helped by the more stable Lubuntu or Xubuntu.

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

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...

I find 32 bit version of Ubuntu to work better on low-spec systems.

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