Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???

Used2BeRX

Hey everybody. I've got an old laptop that has been sitting on a shelf doing nothing for a long while. I made the mistake of putting Win10 on there which made it almost useless and then never did anything with it after that. Was thinking of going back to Win7 and trying it out, but thought I might take this opportunity to dual boot to Linux and have my first non-RP Linux experience with it.

Don't know all the specs, but here's what I know:

3GB ram (probably DDR2, doubtfully DDR3)
AMD Athlon 1600Mhz single core, x64 based
It came with Win7 originally, but I don't remember if they had x64 or went with x32 because of the limited ram.

I'm so new to this and the choices of Linux distros seems pretty daunting for a novice. Was hoping that some of you Linux guys might have a bit of insider info for me.

Thanks!!!!

Used2BeRX

I realize now what a loaded question that was...

So... at least for my first attempt, I think I'm going to go with Zoros OS, or Zoros OS Lite. Sounds like it's a pretty user friendly option for the kids that grew up using Win all their lives. :)

Just got to decide which version to use. According to the requirements the full OS should work, but I've heard on some forums that you might want to use the Lite version if you're not using a more modern rig.

https://zorinos.com/help/system-requirements/

I'd still love to hear from people what distros they prefer and why.

mitu

I'd use something less exotic, like Lubuntu, Linux Mint or Arch Linux. They're quite user friendly and should work on the system you have. The documentation and support is also much better than some guy's Linux distro.

glennlake

@mitu I agree. You can always boot into live CD/DVD to make sure your hardware is up to snuff. Also if your laptop will allow, you can make a bootable USB and try it from that.

VictimRLSH

I'm a Knoppix fan myself, has a massive amount of preloaded content.

mitu

@victimrlsh Unbelievable, Knoppix is still a thing ! I remastered a few Knoppix images once upon a time to make them fit on business cards CDs.

glennlake

@victimrlsh Knoppix was my first exposure of live CD's.

VictimRLSH

Yeah, it's still being updated and supported, including the content. You can just load and go. The best thing about it is that it will autoconfigure any connected hardware.

Used2BeRX

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to have to try something other than Zoros OS anyhow since the bootable USB I made for it won't boot from the stick or install from there either. :(

I'm using Universal USB Installer and I know the program works because I was able to make a bootable stick with Win7 with it that installed on the same laptop without any problems.

A "massive amount of preloaded content" (Knoppix) doesn't sound like what's going to fit my needs. This laptop is pretty slow. At least with Win7 on here I can do a couple of things with it and it's not completely bricked like it was with Win10 on it. But I think I'm going to need a pretty streamlined version of Linux to be of any use here.

VictimRLSH

That is the beauty of Knoppix, it adapts to your system specs. I have an ancient NEC Pentium 60 laptop that the latest distro of Knoppix works on. No, it won't play Tux Racer, but I can still belt out something in Open Office Writer.

Used2BeRX

@victimrlsh I see. That sounds promising.

I have already installed Lubuntu, but I'm trying to figure out how to boot into it. I didn't get any GRUB bootloader. Seems like a common problem with a million and one fixes. That will probably keep me busy for a while.

Once I get that setup, I'll nuke that USB and put Knoppix on it and try that out as well. I've only got a few USB drives, unfortunately. Wish I had about 10 of them so I could start trying out a bunch of these on the fly.

EDIT: Easy enough once I knew what to do. :)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Lubuntu seems to run a bit faster than Win7 does, particularly when accessing the internet. Nothing leaps and bounds above it, but it does seem to eek out just a bit better performance. I'm actually surprised that I can watch videos on Youtube in 480 without any slowdown or stuttering once they get going.

I think that's about the best I can expect out of this relic. I bought it 2nd hand for a song when I ran into a no-working-computer crisis and after I bricked it with Win10 it sat in the attic for 3+ years.

Nice to know that I have a backup in case of emergency again, and now whenever I find something interesting to do that requires Linux, I don't have to go through the hassle of making another USB or DVD and I've got a rig that can boot right into it. :)

Cool stuff. Maybe I'll finally sit down and learn a thing or three about Linux now.

Clyde

@used2berx Have fun. :) I took that path more than eleven years ago and have never regretted it.

chipsnblip

@used2berx i've used dozens of distros throughout the years and keep coming back to good old debian. i have it installed on all my computers, and install it on all my family's computers as well. for the most part, they are not very tech-saavy and haven't had any complaints, only the occasional question.

barbudreadmon

@used2berx depends what you wanna do with it :

if it's for learning purpose, a source based distribution like Gentoo is definitely the best, it also allows to heavily fine tune your system. it's pretty hardcore at first but after a few year you'll know everything there is to know about your linux OS
if it's just for "end user usage", i would go for a minimal installation of debian or ubuntu where i would add only the necessary packages (which is basically what lubuntu is : an ubuntu where they pre-installed a different set of package from standard ubuntu)

Used2BeRX

I haven't really figured out what I want to do with it yet. :)

Lubuntu seems awesome for my immediate needs for it now. It's probably working better now than it did when it was brand new since it came with Win7 and Lubuntu performs notably better.

But it's still just a crappy backup computer if that's all I'm going to use it for. It's my only laptop though, and since I can put it anywhere and tinker with it I think I'll be using it to learn more about Linux now.

Since I learned how to easily create bootable USB drives with the latest versions of Linux, I plan on getting a couple builds and making some drives to try out. My bro thinks he has a stash of old 4 and 8 GB thumb drives that he never uses anymore, so I'll be free to plug'n play when I get my hands on them.

Thanks for the suggestions everybody.

Used2BeRX

So I'm going to get to use my Linux install right away for something! :)

I've been doing some "spring cleaning" on my PC now that I have a laptop to work with and realized that space was a bit tighter than I had imagined. Got most of that taken care of, but then I realized that some backup images that I had made for the various RP versions I had were taking up a HUGE amount of space since those little SD cards were 32GB.

Shrinking them is not going well. Issue number one is that I don't have any USB sticks large enough to carry those images over to my laptop to make quick work of them there, and issue number two is that I seem to be one of the people who cannot use Win32Diskimager to create an image with Win7. Unlike when I put the SD card in my Win10 machine and it shows a "BOOT" partition as well as a partition that "needs to be reformated", it just notices one drive that it says needs the formatting. When I try running Win32Diskimager it fails with a 1117 I/O error.

Here's hoping that the card reader itself is okay. I'm going to be using pure linux commands to do the copy and shrink and then see if I can make a good SD card from these images using both the Linux way and by trying to do it with Windows and the Etcher program.

It will be nice to get all that hard drive space back. :)

mitu

Since you have a Linux installation, you can directly use PiShrink (https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink) from it over the saved .img files.

Clyde

@used2berx said in Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???:

Unlike when I put the SD card in my Win10 machine and it shows a "BOOT" partition as well as a partition that "needs to be reformated", it just notices one drive that it says needs the formatting.

Windows surely has many strengths, but handling foreign file systems isn't one of them. Linux is much more versatile in this regard. So, another use for your Linux installation could arise when you stumble upon any non-Windows media you want to access. It has helped me alot in the past because I have friends with Linux, Windows, and MacOS alike. 😊

@mitu said in Best Linux Distro for old Laptop???:

Since you have a Linux installation, you can directly use PiShrink (https://github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink) from it over the saved .img files.

Thanks also from me, I didn't know this cool tool. 😊

Used2BeRX

My hardware limitations are really starting to frustrate me right now. I haven't been successful in 2 days at shrinking any of these images.

The SD reader in my laptop apparently has some problems. I'm not going to say it's broken yet, because I have no free SD cards to test with, but I can't get Windows or Lubuntu to properly recognize it.

I don't have any thumb drives that are large enough in capacity to simply carry the image over to my laptop.

I had a "bright idea" to clear off space from my XBox and I could FTP the image there and then FTP it onto the laptop. That would have worked great, but I forgot that a limitation of FATX was a filesize of 4GB, so who knows what was going on when I finally caught that and the FTP client said that I had already transferred over 28GB into a file that was only 3.97GB.

So..... I dunno. Going to have to hold off on this until I can borrow a bigger thumb drive or figure out how to network my computers properly to share stuff, which is probably what I should have done in the first place come to think of it. Oh well.

Clyde

@used2berx You could just by a usb card reader. I'm using one from Transcent for approx. 7€ / $8 to my full satisfaction.