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
Another recommendation: Peppermint Linux, a lightweight Debian-based distro with XFCE as the desktop. Designed for older computers, and has a 32-bit version. Not to be confused with Linux Mint.
Safety info: Do not use Damn Small Linux, it is unmaintained and will not receive any security fixes.
About Debian, OpenSUSE not taken into consideration: Linux under-the-hood (not the desktop components) are fast even on old hardware. If you use a light DE/WM like XFCE or IceWM it will run quite smoothly. I have installed Debian on an old computer (2GB RAM, single core Celeron CPU, spinning HDD) and I have not noticed any significant slowdowns.
About Windows 7: I know it’s absolutely unusable, I just don’t want to see it destroyed. Like a rusted-out undriveable classic car that I don’t want to see in a junkyard. Maybe copy the HDD image or something?
I installed antix meanwhile, now can’t connect to wifi