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Debian is wonderful for their old hardware support - they even patch Firefox so it will run on old 32-bit CPU's. You do need a PAE-capable (if 32-bit) CPU, and
by 0815test 8y ago
Debian is wonderful for their old hardware support - they even patch Firefox so it will run on old 32-bit CPU's. You do need a PAE-capable (if 32-bit) CPU, and at least 512MB RAM for a tolerable experience. (You can even surf the web on 512MB, but then the machine will start to swap and feel quite sluggish. For a good web-surfing experience, you'll need 1GB.) For machines that are even older and less capable, you could try getting them to work with TinyCore, but I've not actually tried doing that recently.
For really, really old hardware, I suppose FreeDOS is always an option-- they're currently working on version 1.3, so it would theoretically count as something that's "up to date" - although I wouldn't actually trust FreeDOS software to be secure on today's internet. It does have an auto-updater of sorts, though, FDIMPLES.
- avhon1 8y agoI run Debian on my OLPC XO-1, which has 256 MB of RAM. Firefox launches, but swaps on all but the simplest of pages. WebKit-based browsers are about the same. Seamonkey uses notably less memory and CPU, but still feels constrained. Netsurf, Dillo, xLinks, and text-based browsers all run fine. In my experience with older Thinkpads, 512 MB is adequate for basic browsing with Firefox, 640 MB allows you to avoid swapping on most heavier pages, and 1GB is enough for even the most intense pages, and is adequate for browsing with numerous tabs open. TinyCore isn't really any lighter or faster than Debian in most respects. It has a tiny install size, but that's because it either downloaded applications from the internet or loads them from .tgz files. It isn't substantially faster or less memory-hungry.