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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Additional option: Debian Stable is fine for older desktops and laptops, at least as far back as including mobile Core 2 Duo. Preferably with at least a couple GB RAM and SSD.

It works even better if you disable Wayland and some of the other desktop infrastructure stuff, and use a power-user window manager like around XMonad or i3wm. But the stock Debian Gnome-y desktop performs OK too.

This also fits with using Debian Stable by default everywhere. There's little "scrappy small team" efficiencies when you default to having the same thing on your workstation/laptop, your servers, your RasPis projects, old utility laptops, etc.

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I'm a fan Debian Stable everywhere too - it's likely to have most types of recent software packaged, and the likelihood of success on any arbitrary hardware is very high.

If Linux isn't a requirement, OpenBSD is super lightweight as well.

That's what got me to switch completly from Windows to Linux.

I started by installing a Debian Stable with Xfce on an old Core 2 Duo, then I switched to Testing and slowly got ride of everything from Xfce to i3wm, dunst, jgmenu...

Seeing that my old hardware was more fast, fun and just as useful (even for games) that the recent hardware on a slimed down Windows LTSC was a revelation.

I also run Debian on all of my machines, either Stable or Testing. It runs fine on older machines, at least up to Core 2 Duo (64-bit).

The advantage is that Debian has a very large package repository, is actively maintained (with security updates) and is often supported by externally packaged software.

I agree on everything except when you mention Gnome: it requires accelerated graphics that your old PC might miss (TFA mentions quite old Pentium-era machines).

It is almost impossible to run anything modern on Pentium era machines, and not just because of speed. Even Tiny Core Linux states the absolute minimum of 32/48 MB of memory to be able to boot core+busybox and core+busybox+graphical screen, respectively. These are substantial Pentium era specifications. 128 MB is recommended, which moves the point a couple of years later, and, of course, a bigger number would help.

Frankly, something that resembles more or less modern desktop with some multimedia capabilities, and more or less modern browser to be used to look something up on the Web starts much later, at 2+ core CPU comparable to a fast Core 2 Duo, and 2 gigs of RAM, which is not outside of range of many general purpose distributions. (Yes, quite a lot can be done on a fast single core CPU with just 1 GB, but there are gotchas and pitfalls.)

> Debian Stable is fine

Even better: Devuan with XFCE

I'd rather recommend users to a more mainstream distribution than one driven by ideological difference

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