I digged out my dad’s old business laptop from 2006. This Asus rust is almost as old as me. But it booted up a horribly slow Windows 7 Home Premium that is totally unusable. Takes 30-40 minutes to open Chrome. Here are the specs: 40 gb old hard drive that is suprisingly healthy (96℅ according to HDDsentinel, more than 1000 days left) 1.73 ghz Intel Celeron M single core cpu that wasn’t exactly the fastest even in 2006 1.25 gb of terribly slow RAM American Megatrends BIOS from 2006 I know Linux can’t do miracles, but are there any still supported distro i could install that would actually run better than this shitty windows stuff?

I found puppy slitaz antix tahrpup ArchBang Slax Delicate Damn Small Linux Absolute FunOS LegacyOS exe gnu/linux Do you know others? Or from these which you recommend if my goal is to create a relatively useable, faster computer, preferably while it doesn’t look that awful (the desktop or wm). So usability>speed>looks But all these are very important, just in this order. Also recommend a desktop enviroment or a window manager that runs well, but doesn’t look that awful and can be installed on these distros

  • kekmacskaOP
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    4 days ago

    i’d rather burn it than install ANY kde on that. Arch can get into consideration, maybe. Alpine not because i don’t hate myself enough to use non-gnu linux. This is a 2006 laptop, and not a high-end one. 40 gb hdd. I’m sure as hell it isn’t sata. Sata only started appearing around 2010 in systems that were affordable for a mortal human

    • Hawk@lemmynsfw.com
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      4 days ago

      SATA was definitely around before 2010 in consumer hardware. Nonetheless, Alpine is a great distribution and gnu software is packaged for it and freely available. I believe it is busybox by default.

      It is musl, but in my experience that’s not much of an issue.

      Have you had problems with KDE in the past? I typically use i3 but the QT framework is great.

      • kekmacskaOP
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        3 days ago

        kde is not a problem on high-end hardware. But recommending for this laptop is batshit insane. The fact that you use i3 explains a lot. That’s much more lightweight than kde

    • michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 days ago

      What’s wrong with non-GNU Linux? I’m using Alpine with Gnome DE on my old laptop (3rd generation Core i3, 4GB RAM). It feels much faster than Linux Mint Cinnamon.

      • kekmacskaOP
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        3 days ago

        extremely hard to use. I could install netBSD and Arch, used Tumbleweed, but any non-gnu Linux is beyond me