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Lightweight Linux Distributions for Older PCs

WallyFunk 3y ago
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/ https://www.linuxliteos.com/
ei8ths 3y ago
depending how light weight, my go to on old computers would a xubuntu or xfce flavor. that DE is awesome.
snvzz 3y ago
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.
- wrx100 3y ago
  Building from source can take hours or even days on low-end machines though, unless you can get binaries for the apps you need for your old CPUs.
  - kiwijamo 3y ago
    *BSD provide x86 binaries for most (if not all) packages so this is a non-issue IMHO.
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    I do not know what this means. What would you build from source for OpenBSD and NetBSD ? Both support binary third party packages. But building on Linux will also take just as long, so really a non-issue :)
    - wrx100 3y ago
      Last time I used NetBSD I was building my own packages (and the OS itself) from source (http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html). This was encouraged at the time. You could tweak them with various options and also contribute to the effort (https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/ https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/). 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.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  I came here to say the same. 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.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
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.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  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.
- readingnews 3y ago
  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/ https://distrowatch.com/
aidenn0 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.
- type0 3y ago
  > Debian Stable is fine Even better: Devuan with XFCE
  - IntelMiner 3y ago
    I'd rather recommend users to a more mainstream distribution than one driven by ideological difference
- zdw 3y ago
  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.
- teo_zero 3y ago
  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).
  - ogurechny 3y ago
    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.)
atmosx 3y ago
NetBSD? :-) NetBSD runs great on old hardware. Indeed, supporting old hardware is one of the main goals of the project.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  thou even the "old-school" port seems to require a 486 https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/
  - rahen 3y ago
    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.
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      From 2014, and I'm not sure what specs the machine was running on. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/07/dos-boot-ars-spends-a-day-working-in-freedos/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/07/dos-b...
Beijinger 3y ago
Bodhi User here. Yes, can be used with tiny resources. But runs as well on a fat machine. Pleasant experience.
jamesrr39 3y ago
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 3y ago
> 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.
- 1f60c 3y ago
  > An odd comment. The article reads to me like it was (partially) written by AI.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  Being able to boot a live session from USB is supported in every distro I’ve ever used too
vermaden 3y ago
FreeBSD.
jeffbee 3y ago
"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 3y ago
  in an effort to clear your confusion; the first number is persistent storage, the second one max main memory.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    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.
    - geraldhh 3y ago
      no causation implied
jbverschoor 3y ago
What about lightweight distros for modern PCs?
- jeffbee 3y ago
  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.
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    Sure... but a minimal debian at this point takes 100mb ram, no UI, no nothing. 1 electron or chrome session and you're done.
28304283409234 3y ago
Bodhi. The enlightenment distro. I never thought I'd see the day.
djfergus 3y ago
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)
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  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.
stevezsa8 3y ago
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.
- tomcam 3y ago
  > Even wrote C code to generate HTML for a website The earliest C-MS! Sometimes I crack me up
iamawacko 3y ago
No Arch? :( I use arch btw
type0 3y ago
Notable omissions: Void and Solus
cat_plus_plus 3y ago
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.
- comprev 3y ago
  How do you find the performance for day to day use? My MBA early 2017 (i5/8GB/256) is always nagging me to upgrade to Big Sur, but I did that once (via clean install) and it was terribly slow. Within a few days I was clean installing 10.15 again, back to a fast snappy experience.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    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.
    - cat_plus_plus 3y ago
      Try Opencore Legacy Patcher or patchers for older but still supported OS versions from dosdude1?
    - comprev 3y ago
      I use FF instead of Chrome, and macports for 95% of things which (to my knowledge) still install the latest version of software. Brew started compiling everything recently though so migrated most things to macports...
  - 3y ago
pygar 3y ago
Any Linux desktop OS can be made "lightweight", e.g. just use i3, xfce4 apps and disable the convenience daemons you can live without. The real bottleneck is a web browser that can render the modern web and there is no real solution for that.
- kiwijamo 3y ago
  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.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  > 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.
goodburb 3y ago
Porteus editions boots to RAM, you can unplug flash drive, and plug only when saving same with PuppyLinux. Both support modified Chromium for OOTB hardware video acceleration, known laptop backlight tweaks and fit on 1GB flash drive with 40% free space.
NoboruWataya 3y ago
Surprised no one has mentioned Alpine Linux yet. Or is it too lightweight?
- angra_mainyu 3y ago
  Probably due to musl.
sillywalk 3y ago
https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
hnaccountme 3y ago
I have manjaro running on a 2nd gen intel i7 with 8gb ram. Works fine as a test system
re-lre-l 3y ago
Reminded me about Slackware, my favorite dist 20 years ago. I checked this out and it's still here still alive.
amatecha 3y ago
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. :)
antifa 3y ago
I'm always surprised how little MATE DE (or UbuntuMATE, or GarudaMATE) gets mentioned in threads like this.
amir734jj 3y ago
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.
ogurechny 3y ago
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.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  > 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. The first? Hmm.. my usual list for old PC's: 1. Max out the RAM 2. SSD 3. Still not *feeling* snappy? Throw lean(er) OS and/or apps at it. GPU depends more on 'heavier' games to be run (if any). Not desktop environment. DE 'needs' a better GPU? See #3
  - ogurechny 3y ago
    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.
lormayna 3y ago
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.
redder23 3y ago
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 https://github.com/free-explorers/veshell a Wayland compositor that does the same thing without Gnome.
rahen 3y ago
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.
workfromspace 3y ago
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.
dxxvi 3y ago
How does ArchLinux + OpenBox (e.g. ArcoLinux OpenBox) compare to these Desktop Environment?

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/ https://www.linuxliteos.com/

ei8ths 3y ago

depending how light weight, my go to on old computers would a xubuntu or xfce flavor. that DE is awesome.

snvzz 3y ago

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.

wrx100 3y ago
Building from source can take hours or even days on low-end machines though, unless you can get binaries for the apps you need for your old CPUs.
- kiwijamo 3y ago
  *BSD provide x86 binaries for most (if not all) packages so this is a non-issue IMHO.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  I do not know what this means. What would you build from source for OpenBSD and NetBSD ? Both support binary third party packages. But building on Linux will also take just as long, so really a non-issue :)
  - wrx100 3y ago
    Last time I used NetBSD I was building my own packages (and the OS itself) from source (http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html). This was encouraged at the time. You could tweak them with various options and also contribute to the effort (https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/ https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/). 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.
jmclnx 3y ago
I came here to say the same. 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.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

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.

pjmlp 3y ago
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.
readingnews 3y ago
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/ https://distrowatch.com/

aidenn0 3y ago

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 3y ago

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.

type0 3y ago
> Debian Stable is fine Even better: Devuan with XFCE
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  I'd rather recommend users to a more mainstream distribution than one driven by ideological difference
zdw 3y ago
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.
teo_zero 3y ago
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).
- ogurechny 3y ago
  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.)

atmosx 3y ago

NetBSD? :-) NetBSD runs great on old hardware. Indeed, supporting old hardware is one of the main goals of the project.

geraldhh 3y ago
thou even the "old-school" port seems to require a 486 https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/
- rahen 3y ago
  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.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    From 2014, and I'm not sure what specs the machine was running on. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/07/dos-boot-ars-spends-a-day-working-in-freedos/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/07/dos-b...

Beijinger 3y ago

Bodhi User here. Yes, can be used with tiny resources. But runs as well on a fat machine. Pleasant experience.

jamesrr39 3y ago

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 3y ago

> 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.

1f60c 3y ago
> An odd comment. The article reads to me like it was (partially) written by AI.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
Being able to boot a live session from USB is supported in every distro I’ve ever used too

vermaden 3y ago

FreeBSD.

jeffbee 3y ago

"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 3y ago
in an effort to clear your confusion; the first number is persistent storage, the second one max main memory.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  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.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    no causation implied

jbverschoor 3y ago

What about lightweight distros for modern PCs?

jeffbee 3y ago
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.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Sure... but a minimal debian at this point takes 100mb ram, no UI, no nothing. 1 electron or chrome session and you're done.

28304283409234 3y ago

Bodhi. The enlightenment distro. I never thought I'd see the day.

djfergus 3y ago

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)

jeroenhd 3y ago
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.

stevezsa8 3y ago

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.

tomcam 3y ago
> Even wrote C code to generate HTML for a website The earliest C-MS! Sometimes I crack me up

iamawacko 3y ago

No Arch? :( I use arch btw

type0 3y ago

Notable omissions: Void and Solus

cat_plus_plus 3y ago

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.

comprev 3y ago
How do you find the performance for day to day use? My MBA early 2017 (i5/8GB/256) is always nagging me to upgrade to Big Sur, but I did that once (via clean install) and it was terribly slow. Within a few days I was clean installing 10.15 again, back to a fast snappy experience.
- djbusby 3y ago
  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.
  - cat_plus_plus 3y ago
    Try Opencore Legacy Patcher or patchers for older but still supported OS versions from dosdude1?
  - comprev 3y ago
    I use FF instead of Chrome, and macports for 95% of things which (to my knowledge) still install the latest version of software. Brew started compiling everything recently though so migrated most things to macports...
- 3y ago

pygar 3y ago

Any Linux desktop OS can be made "lightweight", e.g. just use i3, xfce4 apps and disable the convenience daemons you can live without. The real bottleneck is a web browser that can render the modern web and there is no real solution for that.

kiwijamo 3y ago
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.
jeroenhd 3y ago
> 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.

goodburb 3y ago

Porteus editions boots to RAM, you can unplug flash drive, and plug only when saving same with PuppyLinux. Both support modified Chromium for OOTB hardware video acceleration, known laptop backlight tweaks and fit on 1GB flash drive with 40% free space.

NoboruWataya 3y ago

Surprised no one has mentioned Alpine Linux yet. Or is it too lightweight?

angra_mainyu 3y ago
Probably due to musl.

sillywalk 3y ago

https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/

hnaccountme 3y ago

I have manjaro running on a 2nd gen intel i7 with 8gb ram. Works fine as a test system

re-lre-l 3y ago

Reminded me about Slackware, my favorite dist 20 years ago. I checked this out and it's still here still alive.

amatecha 3y ago

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. :)

antifa 3y ago

I'm always surprised how little MATE DE (or UbuntuMATE, or GarudaMATE) gets mentioned in threads like this.

amir734jj 3y ago

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.

ogurechny 3y ago

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.

RetroTechie 3y ago
> 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. The first? Hmm.. my usual list for old PC's: 1. Max out the RAM 2. SSD 3. Still not *feeling* snappy? Throw lean(er) OS and/or apps at it. GPU depends more on 'heavier' games to be run (if any). Not desktop environment. DE 'needs' a better GPU? See #3
- ogurechny 3y ago
  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.

lormayna 3y ago

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.

redder23 3y ago

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 https://github.com/free-explorers/veshell a Wayland compositor that does the same thing without Gnome.

rahen 3y ago

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.

workfromspace 3y ago

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.

dxxvi 3y ago

How does ArchLinux + OpenBox (e.g. ArcoLinux OpenBox) compare to these Desktop Environment?