[HN Gopher] Lightweight Linux Distributions for Older PCs
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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.
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(page generated 2023-11-12 23:00 UTC)