Lightweight OS for old laptop
December 7, 2021 6:05 AM Subscribe
What OS should I put on this old laptop?
I have this old laptop, an ASUS 1015E-DS01, that I would like to get up and running for my little one to play around on. I envision it being used to type in a word processor, listen to some mp3s, watch some videos, and maybe play some games.
I think it has Windows 8 on it still, and it was always pretty slow running that. I'm thinking a lightweight linux distribution might be the right answer.
What do you recommend? I've heard about Lubuntu, but the last askme mentioning that is from 2011. Any ideas?
I have this old laptop, an ASUS 1015E-DS01, that I would like to get up and running for my little one to play around on. I envision it being used to type in a word processor, listen to some mp3s, watch some videos, and maybe play some games.
I think it has Windows 8 on it still, and it was always pretty slow running that. I'm thinking a lightweight linux distribution might be the right answer.
What do you recommend? I've heard about Lubuntu, but the last askme mentioning that is from 2011. Any ideas?
Depends on your specific hardware as to whether drivers for camera, etc. will work, but if you use the Google ecosystem, this Chrome OS-like option can make even lightly powered laptops quite useful again: CloudReady
posted by SNACKeR at 6:32 AM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by SNACKeR at 6:32 AM on December 7, 2021 [2 favorites]
I don’t think you even need to do Lubuntu. That laptop should be plenty powerful enough for regular Ubuntu.
posted by 8603 at 6:39 AM on December 7, 2021
posted by 8603 at 6:39 AM on December 7, 2021
Have just tried to do this with a similar size and era Dell "netbook" (Atom processor, not Celeron) - and the screen resolution was just too low to be useful even to the kids in the family, even with the lightweight Linux distros I tried.
The biggest key to getting something like this usable, would be to replace the incredibly slow HD with an SSD.
posted by rozcakj at 7:36 AM on December 7, 2021
The biggest key to getting something like this usable, would be to replace the incredibly slow HD with an SSD.
posted by rozcakj at 7:36 AM on December 7, 2021
It's not specifically a lightweight distro, but I've found that plain old Debian works smoothly on less powerful machines provided you switch to a lightweight window manager instead of a big desktop (such as gnome, KDE, etc.) If you like to tinker, Openbox is great. If you don't want to configure anything, xfce or icewm work well. A web browser will probably be the most significant resource hog, but that's hard to avoid. It has the advantage that it's very likely to be supported and easy to upgrade for a long time, unlike many distros maintained by one person.
There's also android for x86 computers. I've not tried any contemporary ones.
posted by eotvos at 7:57 AM on December 7, 2021
There's also android for x86 computers. I've not tried any contemporary ones.
posted by eotvos at 7:57 AM on December 7, 2021
My daily driver for a long time was a laptop in that class running Debian Testing with the LXQt desktop environment.
After the GNOME 3 debacle I'd switched to Xfce just to get back to something with a usable desktop-and-panels main interface, and I ran that for several years, but Xfce is built on top of a notoriously unstable and poorly designed graphics toolkit that's also maintained upstream by the GNOME development team. And since I've already had it forcibly demonstrated to me that the GNOME development team is very opinionated about how its components should be used, and likes to change the way those components work on a whim to suit what it sees as the needs of GNOME, I lost confidence in Xfce's long term future - which is a shame, because it's a really tidy desktop environment that runs well on old hardware - and switched to LXQt as soon as its first Debian packaging appeared. I've been happily using that on all my new Debian desktop installs ever since. It's about as good as Xfce now, and much technically easier to keep good.
I picked Debian as a base because it's entirely community supported and has a highly democratic packaging team, and the Testing edition because it's an essentially rolling release so I can apply updates when I feel like it rather than when the release team decides for me that I must, but less likely to suffer from random breakage on updates than Debian's other rolling release option (Unstable). But although Debian is much easier to get going and keep up to date than it used to be, it's still a little gnarly for the inexperienced.
If you haven't wallowed in the Linux desktop swamps before, I think Lubuntu would probably be a saner choice at this point - as of a few versions ago its desktop environment is also LXQt-based, which is excellent because Ubuntu is skilled at polishing these things and LXQt has good bones. And like all the Ubuntu variants it's mostly a snapshot of Debian Unstable under the hood, so you can take almost all of what you learn about how to admin a Linux box with you to Debian once Ubuntu's essentially marketing-driven corporate culture starts to manifest in ways that chafe.
The main reason I'm not still using that machine is that somebody gave me a slightly more capable second-hand one for free, into which I could drop a CPU capable of supporting hardware virtualization, which they now need to in order to run current versions of VirtualBox. The little one-lunged Celeron in your ASUS box doesn't, as far as I know.
But the very first thing I have always done with old laptops before putting any new OS on them is physically remove the spinny disk containing their old OS and replace it with a nice new SSD. I've always used Samsung's EVO series - very quick and good durability for the money.
2GiB RAM and a 1366x768 screen is plenty for LXQt. With an SSD instead of that old 5400rpm spinny, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how brisk it usually feels, though like mine it might stutter a bit on full screen 720p 60fps YouTube streams. 720p 30fps should be completely fine.
posted by flabdablet at 9:02 AM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]
After the GNOME 3 debacle I'd switched to Xfce just to get back to something with a usable desktop-and-panels main interface, and I ran that for several years, but Xfce is built on top of a notoriously unstable and poorly designed graphics toolkit that's also maintained upstream by the GNOME development team. And since I've already had it forcibly demonstrated to me that the GNOME development team is very opinionated about how its components should be used, and likes to change the way those components work on a whim to suit what it sees as the needs of GNOME, I lost confidence in Xfce's long term future - which is a shame, because it's a really tidy desktop environment that runs well on old hardware - and switched to LXQt as soon as its first Debian packaging appeared. I've been happily using that on all my new Debian desktop installs ever since. It's about as good as Xfce now, and much technically easier to keep good.
I picked Debian as a base because it's entirely community supported and has a highly democratic packaging team, and the Testing edition because it's an essentially rolling release so I can apply updates when I feel like it rather than when the release team decides for me that I must, but less likely to suffer from random breakage on updates than Debian's other rolling release option (Unstable). But although Debian is much easier to get going and keep up to date than it used to be, it's still a little gnarly for the inexperienced.
If you haven't wallowed in the Linux desktop swamps before, I think Lubuntu would probably be a saner choice at this point - as of a few versions ago its desktop environment is also LXQt-based, which is excellent because Ubuntu is skilled at polishing these things and LXQt has good bones. And like all the Ubuntu variants it's mostly a snapshot of Debian Unstable under the hood, so you can take almost all of what you learn about how to admin a Linux box with you to Debian once Ubuntu's essentially marketing-driven corporate culture starts to manifest in ways that chafe.
The main reason I'm not still using that machine is that somebody gave me a slightly more capable second-hand one for free, into which I could drop a CPU capable of supporting hardware virtualization, which they now need to in order to run current versions of VirtualBox. The little one-lunged Celeron in your ASUS box doesn't, as far as I know.
But the very first thing I have always done with old laptops before putting any new OS on them is physically remove the spinny disk containing their old OS and replace it with a nice new SSD. I've always used Samsung's EVO series - very quick and good durability for the money.
2GiB RAM and a 1366x768 screen is plenty for LXQt. With an SSD instead of that old 5400rpm spinny, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how brisk it usually feels, though like mine it might stutter a bit on full screen 720p 60fps YouTube streams. 720p 30fps should be completely fine.
posted by flabdablet at 9:02 AM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]
Lubuntu is my go-to for repurposing older hardware. You can boot from a USB storage device if you want to take it for a spin before committing.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 5:43 PM on December 7, 2021
posted by HiroProtagonist at 5:43 PM on December 7, 2021
Response by poster: Ended up trying out both Lubuntu and Elementary OS and decided on Elementary OS. Thanks!
posted by msbrauer at 5:56 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by msbrauer at 5:56 PM on December 14, 2021 [1 favorite]
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