So i have a bunch of pc’s/laptops/computers and such that my family members refuse to depart with even though there really bad. so far they mangae to keep 4 bulky computers in total, we do have some new-ish ones but theses ones im talking about need some loving.1 computer is 32 bit and has 2gb of ram, the other 3 have 64-bit and range from 1gb of ram- to 2 and one of which has only 75 space hardrive.

are there any linux distros that might work becasue im a noob who uses windows so im very lost. any tips or suggestions or something would be great.

also if im posting in the wrong plac eplease let me know in the comments.

  • silent_clash@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Puppy Linux runs on a potato of any architecture and is super user friendly (grandpa certified)! Only 300 MB or so. https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/

    I know a lot of people recommended Mint, which I personally use on my very modern budget gaming pc, but you should really try Puppy Linux, it’s meant for the exact use case you’re describing.

  • 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    those are very low specs for every day distros (meaning usable for the general public), you might get away with linux mint xfce, if it ends up usable on those machine and not lag too much then don’t bother with anything else, otherwise you might have to install lighter stuff like antix or lxle. If none of the above are usable you can always install puppy linux, it can run on a toaster but is not very pleasant to use. note that regardless of distro, surfing the web is going to be a chore due to half of the modern internet being heavy as fuck and hard to run, you might want to look for alternative frontend to websites like piped for youtube, urlebird for tiktok etc.

  • rimu@lemmy.nzEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Browser choice is probably going to make just as much difference as distro choice. Modern browsers kinda need at least 1 GB to be usable, ideally more. Depends what you do with it of course.

    Try Pale Moon, Falkon and Konqueror.

    • naoseiquemsou@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      In my experience, palemoon struggles a lot with modern JavaScript-bloated sites and becomes much slower to use. My suggestion is to use 32bit firefox.

  • ppp@lemmy.oneEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve used Debian on an old netbook with an Intel Atom and onyl 2GB RAM. The experience wasn’t so bad but web browsing was definitely a pain. Video calling and watching YouTube (Firefox) was very sluggish and annoying to deal with. It’s fine for working with documents and watching low resolution videos locally but that’s about it.

    I’ve also tried antiX but a lot of the defaults were annoying. If you (or your family members) can deal with it, then it’s probably the best lightweight Linux distro out there.

    are there any linux distros that might work becasue im a noob who uses windows so im very lost. any tips or suggestions or something would be great.

    In this case, I recommend just leaving your family members to do their own thing. From my experience, it is very hard to manage other people’s Linux issues if you don’t have decent knowledge on it yourself. If they don’t want to upgrade, that’s their problem. Not yours.

  • keet@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I would suggest Mint. Considering the hardware, the XFCE version. Have you looked into any hardware upgrades for these machines? I’ve found that a simple ram or hdd–>ssd upgrade can be rather inexpensive these days.

    • Sorchist@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      There are a lot of distros which are more focused on old hardware than Mint, but Mint definitely wins in the “this distro will be familiar and discoverable to people who are used to Windows” department. If it works, it’s great for that reason.

  • Parallax@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’d like to do something similar on my Pentium 3 box. Maybe Debian with a really light WM would be a good fit, maybe IceWM? It only has 512MB of RAM though so I might have to go even lighter than Debian. I also have an Athlon XP box with 2GB of RAM, but that’s too new to be fun. :p