Linux for an old laptop

NeghVar

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I found some old laptops that still work fine but the HDD is wiped. Both have 4GB RAM. CPUs are a Core 2 Duo T5500 and a Celeron 205. I installed the latest version of Linux Mint and it is running rather slow. Is there another flavor someone could suggest that will run Libre Office and web browsing smoothly? Perhaps older versions.
 
With 4gb of ram, even on Linux, you'll have some slowdown. Ubuntu is probably the heaviest resource wise, so try something like Manjaro.
 
Puppy or Artix, maybe? Or Arch with a lightweight desktop/window manager installed (lxde, openbox, etc).
 
4 GB RAM is going to be a tough time for a modern web browser and probably LibreOffice, and running a full desktop environment (DE) is not going to help. You could try running a lightweight DE such as XFCE or LXDE. One or both should be in the Mint repos, or you can load up a dedicated distro (e.g., Xubuntu/Lubuntu). Can't hurt to try.
 
actually, Google Docs seems to be doing quite well. I'll try that. It's what my daughter has been using on her Chromebook.
 
actually, Google Docs seems to be doing quite well. I'll try that. It's what my daughter has been using on her Chromebook.
would you consider cloudready (chromeos). if a chromebook is what shes used to, those laptops should run it fine.
 
https://manjaro.org/download/

If you want light while still having all the toys. Try Manjaro XFCE. XFCE is light and should run fairly well on 4gb.

However I can tell you now what is killing performance.... The core 2 duo gen Intel chips. I don't mean they are old and slow... I mean they have a ton of Mitigations on by default in Linux that will destroy performance. (well they are also old... but ya the last few years Intel mitigations have hammered older chips like those)

IF and only IF this is not a mission critical system you can disable the mitigations for Specter type attacks. Which will likely net you 20-30% more performance.

Most distros all you have to really do is add mitigations=off to your grub kernel boot parameter. (there are a ton of other argument options to disable specific attacks like nospectre_v1 nospectre_v2 nospec_store_bypass_disable and if your still semi paranoid you can add those 3... and keep most other more likely attack vector mitigations on)
{edit with your fav text editor nano or vim /etc/default/grub

Find this line.... and add mitigations=off it will probably look something like this.
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quite splash mitigations=off"
}
just add the mitigations=off argument and reboot.... you can try that with the disro you got on their now might make a big difference. You can also install a lighter desktop environment such as XFCE in Mint as well and select that from your login manager. Between those two things you might be golden.
 
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Oh if you do want to switch mint to XFCE... its as simple as opening a command dialog and typing

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop -y

Then just restart and when you log in... change the session to XFCE.
 
Manjaro will run great since it's Arch with XFCE. Far more lightweight than anything else outside of something like Puppy Linux. Even straight Arch is easy to install now with their new command line installer so you could go pure Arch and run really lightweight.

And as ChadD said add the mitigations=off flag to the kernel boot parameters and enjoy the performance boost.

As for an office program I used LibreOffice for a long time. I've recently been playing with OnlyOffice and like it quite a bit. I find that it's more compatible with MS Office formatted documents.
 
Not the most popular opinion, but I for one think there is no 'good Linux for old computer'.
It's a modern, feature-rich kernel with often cutting-edge stuff enabled, and a celeron is... a celeron, to put it mildly.

4GB should be okay for any of them, most if not all distros will let you choose roles, which come with background daemons and servers, and you can pretty much disable everything but the desktop, including printer support, SAMBA (file sharing with Windows), etc.

As for specific software, I like Abiword and it can run circles around Libre writer if you need to type.
For browsing... I used to recommend Firefox in the very beginning, then it went to shit, and I'm not sure if it's good enough these days.
BUT if you go the KDE route, there are Konqueror or Falkon. I used the former extensively back in the day and it's fast (it uses resources already loaded to memory as part of the KDE), I hear Falkon is better.
 
4GB is more than enough for Linux. KDE can clean boot @400MB, XFCE can do similar, I don’t spend much time in Gnome but a few I’ve tried booted up around 800-900MB, but I never tried to optimize it down. If you want to add speed, I’d put in an SSD if you can, old HDs are going to feel slow no matter what you do.

I’ve got Zorin Lite running on a 1GB Pentium M laptop my wife uses it mostly to play music. It boots up around 300MB RAM used and plays music and video fine. Think I loaded Falkon on it, maybe Brave, I forget. You’ll want to experiment with some apps to see which run faster.
 
I had a similar laptop, dell with 4gb and core 2 duo. the original hard drive was slow as $hit which made it unusable with windows or linux. for fun I pulled the old HD and put in a 25$ kingston ssd and now its plenty fast enough for basic stuff with linux mint.
 
I had a similar laptop, dell with 4gb and core 2 duo. the original hard drive was slow as $hit which made it unusable with windows or linux. for fun I pulled the old HD and put in a 25$ kingston ssd and now its plenty fast enough for basic stuff with linux mint.
Oh yeah, if it has an old spinner, a ssd can make a huge difference.
 
Thx all. Found one to use that still has the Windows feel but with minimal bells and whistles. Going with Google Docs to keep things simple and not involve other apps. Just stick to the browser as much as possible for an interface most people are familiar with.
During my research, I also came across a Linux distro chart. O.M.G. I never knew there were so many. Numerous names I recognized.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Linux_Distribution_Timeline_27_02_21.svg
 
Thx all. Found one to use that still has the Windows feel but with minimal bells and whistles. Going with Google Docs to keep things simple and not involve other apps. Just stick to the browser as much as possible for an interface most people are familiar with.
During my research, I also came across a Linux distro chart. O.M.G. I never knew there were so many. Numerous names I recognized.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Linux_Distribution_Timeline_27_02_21.svg
Glad you got something going.
I am pretty sure that graphic is missing a bunch... there are more distros then stars in the galaxy. (joking)

https://distrowatch.com/
Head on down the rabbit hole. Their page hit rating stuff gives you sort of a idea of which distros are popular at the moment. Distrowatch is nice for getting a short break down of makes a bunch of distros tick. A lot of distros exist to fill a specific hole. From their you can see some of the long running top 20 type distros... and they all have their advantages and drawbacks.
 
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