Ask HN: Best OS for Old Laptops? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best OS for Old Laptops?

4 pointspentagrama9 comments

Hi, my mom have an old laptop and is working really slow. I want to improve my mom's experience. She just use it to browse the web; check emails, read articles, maybe some video. I want to ask you what OS you recommend to install.

Here is the situation:

HARDWARE<br/> Toshiba Satellite C655 (2011ish) - CPU Intel Pentium T4500 @ 2.30GHz - Video LP156WH2-TLAA (1366x768@60Hz) - 2GB RAM - 230 GB

SOFTWARE - Windows 10 (pre-installed, upgraded to 10 trough the years), zero extra apps on startup. - Recently installed a clean Ubuntu 21.10 in dual boot. - She uses Firefox with Ublock Origin.

EXPERIENCE It is just really slow. Windows is a nightmare, like 10 seconds to display the start menu, ages to open Firefox and do stuff, even typing gets delayed sometimes. I installed Ubuntu to see if it gets better, it feels more snappy, now she is using that, but still slow to respond and interact.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Edit: Sorry I don't know how to do line breaks here instead of paragraphs. The post is messed up.

A quick DDG brought up this list https://itsfoss.com/lightweight-linux-beginners/

Out of all of them on the list I would go for antiX (https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/docs-antiX-19/FAQ/index...)

If you can - get hold of a second hand SSD on eBay/Amazon

Upgrading the RAM to 4GB and adding a SSD (the cheapest SATA one will do) will make a huge difference.

This

Agree, this is the first thing you should do, add more RAM and replace HDD with SSD. If possible 6-8G of RAM.

I'd recommend q4os distro. I tried it on old toshiba chomebook with 2Gb RAM and it works quite well. Trinity desktop environment looks like old Windows. And another good alternative is Crunchbang++ (CBPP). OpenBox windows manager requires you to have alternative approach on UI a bit but it works very fast. I personaly use CBPP on my laptops (both, old and fresh enoght).

Try Xubuntu or Lubuntu. These are targeted for lower hardware requirements than a base Ubuntu system with GNOME. If you can upgrade the hardware, adding 2GB more RAM could help (with the current config, I doubt if the laptop can have more RAM). Getting a small SSD would also help speed things up.

Any Linux distribution where you can choose components will work.

For example, NixOS, GuixSD, Arch Linux, Alpine...

On old hardware, the best thing you can do is to set it up without a desktop environment.

So just a window manager running on bare X. I like this setup so much I also use it on fast machines. Latency is way lower.

Puppy Linux

OpenBSD.

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