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Was looking for a light distro last week. antiX looked promising but then I discovered its "Proudly anti-fascist"?, anyway installed lubuntu and it works perfectly for what I need.
i had a very good experience with https://antixlinux.com/
it is a bit bloated at first but it runs very nice on very old hardware. (32 bit incl.)
you can try it with (preferably a fast) live usb stick
I'm planning on looking at antiX (and here with the FAQ here) these days as the lightweight alternative and direct competitor to Puppy. Tested the LiveCD a couple of days ago and it was pretty impressive. On a clean boot from Live, Conky (which runs by default) indicated 121mbs in use.
runs from CD, will load to RAM ("toram" option), lots of options for running directly from USB, running from RAM with persistance, built-in LiveUSB creator, create snapshot ISO creator, etc..
It's meant to be highly portable and flexible from what I could see.
I only spent about an hour with it because I was going through a massive amount of Live Distros (distro-hopping bug kicked in after a couple of years, wanted to see what was out there...). Everything is still a blur:) Good thing I took notes.
It's based on a debian base so the support should be there. I believe the kernel is 4.10.5. Very low minimum requirements:
> antiX-core and antiX-net will run with 128MB RAM plus swap, but don’t expect miracles! ... 192MB RAM is the recommended minimum for antiX. 256MB RAM and above is preferred especially for antiX-full.
You couple this OS with something like Palemoon (which I did not install) and it should fly. I did run TOR Browser (statically link, portable binary) which I do on this kind of quick testing and it ran as expected.
Wifi tip from my own notes:
> launchMenu -> Applications -> Internet -> WCID Network Manager (pass = demo)
This should display all wireless connections.
If you want USB persistence, ie you want to run the OS off the USB stick and save all your data to it between sessions, MX and AntiX are among the best.
https://antixlinux.com/the-most-extensive-live-usb-on-the-planet/
debian with a light desktop or a wm, or debian based, such as antix linux, q4os, sparky linux and mx linux.
given the architecture, your computer is probably underpowered for some tasks, so my suggestion is to go with antix linux which uses very little resources that are already limited. it still offers a nice user interface that is easy to use.
If you're not up for /u/al1pa's Debian recommendation, AntiX is a very light, Debian-based distro with a number of MX Linux tools and a good community. It runs on IceWM and doesn't use systemd, so it's a different take on Debian. I'm not an Ubuntu fan, but their Mate version seems snappier than their regular versions.
I don't know what you plan to write with, but I've been using FocusWriter recently. Better experience than the office suite word processors, though obviously not as many features.
Hey, could be worse. I lived with an Athlon XP 2500+ for a month and a half in 2020 because my notebook broke. That's a 2003 processor. 1GB of RAM and a 40GB IDE drive, with an NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 64, that's a 1999 card, and it wasn't even good when it released.
However, I survived this fairly well! How? Linux.
Hear me out, don't use Windows XP, it's insecure as hell, and the source code got leaked couple of months ago so it's even more insecure. Don't you dare connect that to the internet. If you are actually going to use that system, I highly recommend you install a Linux distro, and you can learn something new in the meantime. For old PCs, I always go with antix, try it out here: https://antixlinux.com/
That is what made my month and a half not only bearable, but enjoyable. I recommend you use Palemoon as a web browser, it's pretty lightweight and it's based on Firefox.
jep, it is optimised to work well for that usage, and they have a bunch of tools to help with that.
Idk if it runs on ARM, but i'm using AntiX on my 700 mb RAM laptop. Otherwise i heard there is an ARM port of Debian, you can try that as well.
Xfce does use less resources than Cinnamon, but I doubt you will see a meaningful boost in performance if you switch to it. The resource hog will still be your web browser.
I suggest you also look at AntiX - I find it is a better fit for old CPUs, and it will run will on 2GB RAM. I have it on a very old Pentium laptop with a whopping 512MB RAM, and it is a functional machine. https://antixlinux.com/
As your PC does not have SSE2, it means you have an Pentium III or worse. These CPUs are to slow for modern Systems, even a light Linux. Even Linux specialized on old PCs like Antix does not have support for these CPUs since its 2015 release https://antixlinux.com/ because you likely need a non pae version.
If your father doesn't want to spend much money, maybe you can persuade him to use a Raspberry Pi 4? It will pay for itsself in a year because of the much lower electrical bill.
With your specs, I'd consider either LXLE or antiX.
LXLE is based on Ubuntu LTS, is extremely light on resources and was the most trouble-free Linux I've run in old computers and netbooks I tried. However if you wanna venture outside what's preinstalled, it will require you some Linux knowledge.
antiX is frequently updated and is more welcoming to new users. Also it runs really well from a flash drive.
To free up as much RAM and CPU resources as possbile, I'd recommend AntiX and Bodhi Linux, or possibly even Q4OS which use very lightweight DE's, even more so than Lubuntu or Xubuntu.
If you'd clicked the link, you'd see what that desktop looks like. :)
I really like MX Linux as /u/Itookmyprozac suggested, but on that laptop I'd go even lighter. AntiX is a sister project of MX and offers lighter weight window manager options. If it were me, though, I'd install something like crunchbang++, which is Debian stable with OpenBox and Tint2 as a panel. If all you're doing is streaming video, you don't need a lot of bells and whistles.
As always with "which distro" questions, there's no unique and ultimate anwer. So let's add another option to the list!
Antix is a Debian based distro with special optimizations for old hardware, yet provinding up-to-date software. It supports 32 and 64 bits.
Nevertheless I agree that your web browsing experience won't be too good, but you cuold find some alternatives. For example, if YouTube doesn't work, try copying the video url and using mpv to play it: it uses youtube-dl in the background to cache it. You might want to limit the video resolution to 480p.
AntiX
Debian base, 32 and 6f4bit support. 256MB minimum RAM requirement. Yes, that's megabytes not Gigabytes!
As has been stated using the modern internet on low spec machine may be troublesome. https://antixlinux.com/
Antix Linux is a distribution that is meant to run on very old hardware, I’d look into that.
You can most certainly learn web development with such an old machine, but you’ll need to keep everything minimal. Even VS Code, the go to text editor for starting out learning to code would have a hard time running on such a machine, so you’d want to use a terminal based text editor like vim, nano, or micro.
>do you have any tips that I can follow to make everything a tiny bit quicker?
1.8GB RAM is too small, even for LM Xfce. I think antiX or Bodhi Linux would be better choices for this machine. I have used both, and I really like Bodhi for low resource systems - the Moksha desktop is nice.
Manjaro only supports 64 bit CPUs. There is Archlinux32, but it requires you to do a manual (Arch) installation.
Check out antiX, it targets old PCs and doesn't even require a CPU with a PAE extension.
When people ask for the lightest. Then I know they have the poorest hardware to man. You're not going to be happy at all. So advising you to buy better hardware. So any Linux distro will run on it just fine. Even the bloated ones and the demanding resources ones. My PC can operated just fine, don't matter what Linux distro I put on it. And I'm super happy. Don't you want to be happy too?
I guess try out AntiX and see how your poor hardware works with it. If you have to go lower than that, than Puppy is your last hope.
I have an old eeePC laying around with an Atom 32 bit processor and 2 Gb of RAM. I recently installed Antix Linux just to play around. Runs quite smoothly all things considered. Maybe give it a shot.
Debian Stable base. 256Mb RAM minimum. Minimal hard drive space required. Runs lightweight ROX-ICEWM window manager vs full DE, but still looks pretty good OoB considering. I think it's a really cool distro for old hardware.
So I know you said not to recommend Debian or Arch based distros but with those specs you might want to choose a distro that can get as much power out of it as possible. That said, I would need to know what you're using this machine for. I'm going to assume daily usage means web browsing and some light apps. For that I really don't recommend Arch as it's not as stable as Debian and you would probably want something reliable and stable for daily usage.
I recommend Antix Linux, based on Debian. It's one of the lightest Distros out there because it uses Ice Window Manager instead of a desktop environment. Its super speedy on even extremely ancient hardware. You can download it here: https://antixlinux.com
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Or you can just completely ignore what I said above and go for Debian.
antix seems to do just fine on something really old, it may have been 128MB. I can't remember it was a spare laptop that I had forgotten about but was able to get my dad to use whilst malware riddled his Windows PC. Worked really well given it was an ancient pentium.
What is the project? What application, game, or service do you want to run on that old computer?
As for distributive, check Antix. https://antixlinux.com/download/
There are distros for old hardware, like AntiX Linux or Puppy Linux. I had a quite pleasent experience with the latter on an old MSI Wind netbook (1 Ghz Atom, 1Gb Ram). Definitly a better experience than Arch or debian, which i both tried (with a minimal setup ofc).
If OP didn't change his WM, this might be Absolute Linux, antiX or Vector Linux. But, as you can replace the WMs as you desire, this can be anything
A 32-bit system is usually slower, but not much you can do about that. What you should know is that a lot of distributions are ending support for 32-bit systems, so your options are limited.
My recommendation is antiX. It's one of the most lightweight distros out there and can run on very little RAM and CPU power. Even there, performance might start to get spotty when doing certain things like web browsing and playing video games. That's nearly unavoidable on such an old system.
at that point, i would not really recommend lubuntu
have you tried the extremely light linux distros like AntiX?
i really recommend trying AntiX, it works on less than 256 MB of ram
Puppy is OK. But try out AntiX, which is a lower end from the same developer from MX.
I think 8GB should be enough to boot into MX. So it's either your graphic card giving it some problems. As the driver isn't install by default. or you actually don't have much RAM to process it all. It's either or and a bigger USB drive isn't going to fix that, if that's the case.
256 MB is the minimal listed, but with 3 Firefox tabs it's still under 500MB last time I checked. It does, but it doesn't notify you when there is (you can easily set it up so it tells you ).
antiX Linux, powered by Debian GNU/Linux. best distribution ever. LiveUSB + WM or headless. You can install a desktop environment if you want, but there's no DE ISO download. (There's MX Linux for that.) Uses its own repository along with Debian repositories, making it Debian compatible. Offers a choice between System V init or runit init. (I recommend runit init.) Completely free from systemd and includes Devuan workarounds to make programs that depend on systemd work without it. The net ISO is only 150 MB. The only problem is that it's one of those distros where you'll get killed if you don't do your research first. Have a look at Dolphin Oracle's YouTube channel and watch his multiple series on antiX, which is related to MX Linux. also take a look at the antiX Web site and antiX forum. EDIT: Sorry I didn't see you only had under 24 hours of GNU/Linux. In that case antiX will be very difficult, and don't even try to go with any distribution with a WM. Stick to a DE for now.
An old T30 is not going to run Pop OS. It may run Debian with a lightweight window manager (openbox, fluxbox, etc.). Might try Anti-X which is Debian based with multiple lightweight window manager desktops available.
I say in the order you currently have them. MX and Deepin might be neck to neck. Zorin you might notice some slowness.
MX
Deepin
Zorin
If you want to go lighter I would suggest;
AnitX - https://antixlinux.com/
Also, have you tried antiX yet? There's installation info on the System Requirements page.
With Slitaz, did you use the loram version?
I run MX Linux in a 8 year old ASUS laptop with only 4G of RAM with an i3 CPU, and it's snappy. I also run ArcoLinux on it (because I like it) and it runs fine too.
Both are in Openbox or XFCE, sometimes i3, predicated on mood lol.
I don't do any sort of gaming on any of my computers, but I do use it for video playback with Vapoursynth and shader scripts, and again, it runs fine.
It also ran Solus OS fine as well.
Where it ate up all the RAM: Win 10, even though I still ran madvr on it.
Have you checked out anything about AntiX? Really small lightweight OS.
It is Debian based but has so much available it's really more complete than many higher end distro's.
i have antix (light debian based distro) on my thinkpad x32 i watch youtube videos browse the web and do some docs and other fun stuff on it with the minimal of 512mb ram and 1.8ghz pentium m https://antixlinux.com/
I don't have such hardware so I can't comment on that. But either way, the MX team don't even advertise MX as being lightweight, they say it's mid-weight. antiX on the other hand is targeted for older hardware.
In any case, I'm not pushing Plasma here, I'm just trying to see the dev's opinion on the OS's aesthetics, and whether they're ok with how it looks right now or if they plan to change it. IMO it can be XFCE or KDE or whatever, but IMHO it'd be great for it to look at least a little more modern.
That CPU does not support 64bit code but does support PAE.
Perhaps try the i386 (32-bit) version of AntiX?
Even if you're able to get a distro installed on that system, keep in mind that you will have awful performance if you try to browse the web. Both Chrome and Firefox need over 1GB of RAM for themselves--not including OS overhead--and the 745 processor is too slow to render modern web pages. Even a Raspberry Pi 4 would be faster.
I've never done a remix, but I have dome an antiX USB with persistence before. Here's the nice video tutorial I followed. He uses an AntiX instance on a Virtualbox, but I did on a live running instance and had no issues. If I remember correctly he does talk about remixing at some point. Anyway, try searching the topic here https://antixlinux.com/documents/.
I was about to mention antiX. They do a tight collaboration with MX. The system is basically Debian with sysvinit instead of systemd and meant for use on old and/or low-resource hardware.
Not trying to slam you by posting same text that I did in the r/Anarchism thread but I meant to post here originally so here it is again...
Lunduke is an alarmist and very divisive figure in the linux community. He attacked Mozilla for donating money to Rise Up which is a FLOSS email service used by many people including antifa whom he called domestic terrorist. His arguments were weak which is possibly way he took down the video. I used to like him and got sucked into his shit by the clickbaity “why linux sucks” series.
Linux is great though. More lefties should ditch microsoft and apple for a truly free as in freedom OS. Try Ubuntu or Mint out. Or if you want an explicitly left wing OS check out antix.
r/linux thread
Lunduke is an alarmist and very divisive figure in the linux community. He attacked Mozilla for donating money to Rise Up which is a FLOSS email service used by many people including antifa whom he called domestic terrorist. His arguments were weak which is possibly way he took down the video. I used to like him and got sucked into his shit by the clickbaity “why linux sucks” series.
Linux is great though. More lefties should ditch microsoft and apple for a truly free as in freedom OS. Try Ubuntu or Mint out. Or if you want an explicitly left wing OS check out antix.
r/linux thread
For the cpu, it's quite slow. I don't think something like lubuntu would be fast enough. antix17 would run better, outside of something that runs entirely in ram such as porteus. https://antixlinux.com/download/
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AntiX is neat. I've yet to find a device where it doesn't boot and it's currently installed on a laptop of mine with nearly the same specs as yours. You'll likely need the 32 bit version, which defaults to a non-pae kernel.
Web browsing with 256mb of RAM is painful of course, I mostly use links2, which is up and running within one second, but far from being a full featured web browser, midori kind of works (slow). No chance to run firefox (which comes pre-installed with AntiX).
Edit: Spelling
I'm gonna urge you to take a look at Debian-based antiX Linux. It was one of my first Distros and it ran well on an old Pentium III (coppermine) Insperon I had.
It'll run from a live USB, so you can easily try it, and it's so small you can still burn a live CD of it! To quote:
There are several DE's, the heaviest of which is Xfce, though I'm partial to "Fluxbox" on antiX. I don't know why. :P
I really think this will serve you best. Good luck! Keep us informed!
How light do you want to go? I think the lightest I've used was antiX(Distrowatch/antiX website). It's based on Debian's "Stable" branch and its "full distro" version is @650 MB. It'll run on 32bit and 64 bit Intel-AMD x86 systems.
I used to play with antiX on an old---old---Pentium 3 (coppermine) Dell Insperon with the <em>Fluxbox</em> desktop. I did this when I was like you, taking my first steps with Linux. I found both antiX and Fluxbox to be easy to learn and modify because both are very well documented and have new users in mind.
(And now I need to put "antiX with Fluxbox" on a VM and start playing with it again ;) )