[HN Gopher] Lightweight Linux Distributions for Older PCs ___________________________________________________________________ Lightweight Linux Distributions for Older PCs Author : billybuckwheat Score : 44 points Date : 2023-11-12 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.freecodecamp.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.freecodecamp.org) | WallyFunk wrote: | 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. | | [0] https://www.linuxliteos.com/ | ei8ths wrote: | depending how light weight, my go to on old computers would a | xubuntu or xfce flavor. that DE is awesome. | snvzz wrote: | I have found that Openbsd and Netbsd often work better than Linux | on older PCs. | | Non-UNIX systems like KolibriOS, Haiku or Aros tend to fly on | hardware where UNIX does not. | | On an old enough system, FreeDOS, ELKS or Fuzix. | FirmwareBurner wrote: | 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. | readingnews wrote: | 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/ | pjmlp wrote: | 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. | aidenn0 wrote: | 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. | neilv wrote: | 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. | atmosx wrote: | NetBSD? :-) | | NetBSD runs great on old hardware. Indeed, supporting old | hardware is one of the main goals of the project. | geraldhh wrote: | thou even the "old-school" port seems to require a 486 | | https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/ | Beijinger wrote: | Bodhi User here. Yes, can be used with tiny resources. But runs | as well on a fat machine. Pleasant experience. | jamesrr39 wrote: | 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. | schemescape wrote: | > The best part is that Peppermint OS is free to download and | try. | | An odd comment. Isn't that the case for all these distributions? | | Edit to add: I would say a more interesting factor is being able | to test drive from a USB drive without having to install | anything. | vermaden wrote: | FreeBSD. | jeffbee wrote: | "This tiny OS weighs in at under 300MB, so it can run smoothly | even on systems with as little as 512MB of RAM." | | Either written by ChatGPT or author is quite confused. | geraldhh wrote: | in an effort to clear your confusion; the first number is | persistent storage, the second one max main memory. | jeffbee wrote: | 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. | jbverschoor wrote: | What about lightweight distros for modern PCs? | jeffbee wrote: | 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. | 28304283409234 wrote: | Bodhi. The enlightenment distro. I never thought I'd see the day. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-12 23:00 UTC)