So my wife has a 10 year old low end notbook. 500Gb of storage (HDD), 2GB of GDR3 RAM, and an intel Celeron Processor N2806. It originally came with Win 8, then she “upgraded” to win 10 and after that it was pretty much unusable. I am talking CPU and Ram about 80-90% in idle, opening a browser got everything down to a crawl. She mostly used it a storage and brwosing, watching youtube and occasionally to write. So I (also a Linux newbie) finally got the time to install a newbie friendly Os (Fedora) and it’s so much better! I am Talking 20%CPU usage and 50%(?) RAM in idle.
It’s crazy how, when you think in terms of modern windows requirements, a dual core, 1.6Ghz, 4.5W cpu sounds like a rock. But if you showed that to someone in the early 2000s running XP with a single core 500Mhz, they would expect it to be blazing fast. Linux gives you the ability to have that performance, along with modern security and functionality, even if windows won’t 👍.
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Thats the system overwatch:
Lububtu is another lightweight distro for old devices. I’ve used it before on very old devices and it’s great!
Lubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu…I’ve gone from Lu to Xu, but I think I’ll end up with ku because PipeWire and wayland and flatpak (I get the impression that they’re the way forward for the next while…). They’ll make pretty much anything work better than whatever windows version retired them.
Kubuntu has been the best Ubuntu for a while, the mainline keeps going further and further down the bad way.
Still, debian is good too.
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I also got an old notebook, atom N260 32 bits, 3GB of RAM. I put a 128GB SSD, then I installed MX Linux with Xfce (MX21.3_386) and it’s usable for light tasks. Yes browsing heavy sites is slow, but everything else works pretty well.
Puppy linux would be fun to run on a machine like this one, but fedora with Gnome is light enough 100% better then win 10
Just install xfce Or mate de with ubantu Or mint or any other distro except arch
Why not arch?
Can break very easily always update and update break and also not noob friendly
I’ve had more breaking updates in Ubuntu LTS releases than arch based ones. Especially when at some point you always find yourself forced to use PPAs.
To me, being “noob unfriendly” is disabling flatpak to push a (semi) proprietary broken mess.
You did good opting for a Linux distribution, but Gnome (Fedora’s desktop environment) is still pretty heavy: they recommend 4GB ram at least.
I would suggest a more lightweight desktop environment like LXQt. The best distributions that ship it are:- Fedora LXQt edition: if you’re already used to Fedora commands and
dnfpackage manager - Lubuntu: probably the most user friendly for beginners
- SparkyLinux: for users that are a little more advanced but that has the lightest and most rock solid base (Debian)
- Fedora LXQt edition: if you’re already used to Fedora commands and
Linux Mint would even be lighter
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Turn it into a plex media server.
I’ve always wanted to run a media server (Jellyfin, not Plex), but thought you need something more capable to have a good experience. Am I wrong?
Nah, I use to run plex on a crap laptop. Only thing it couldn’t do, was handle x265
Try something like Linux Mint with the Xfce edition. Might be able to lower the RAM a bit more.
Or just xfce on Fedora.
I quite like Ubuntu budgie edition.
If you have a little cash to spare, I’d recommend upgrading this thing a little bit.
A 480GB SATA 2.5" SSD costs around €22.
8GB of DDR3 can be had for ~€10.
So with maybe €35 of investment (and probably much less if you buy used stuff from your local flea market app) you could make the laptop much faster and much more usable.
If you don’t actually need ~500GB of storage, a 240GB SSD can be had for ~€12.
That sounds quite intriguing, I’ll shop around and give you an update!
You won’t believe what a difference any kind of SSD makes.
I ordered the parts now, a 8gb ram stick (gddr3) and a 520gb ssd for all in all 34€. The parts should arrive in about 2 weeks. Thank you!
Nice! Good luck! To find out how to open it, just look for a video on Youtube if it turns out more complicated than expected.
Btw, if you already have it open, cleaning the fans/fan grilles and potentially even repasting the CPU is usually pretty easy to do and on older laptops easily doubles your CPU performance.
I’ve looked up a video, took it apart, got it all together again. Tried booting it up, paniced for 2 seconds because it couldn’t detect the hard drive anymore, then realised that I had forgotten to plug the drive back in properly (silly me). Opened it up again, got the lill cable back where it belongs and screwed everything together (again). Works like a charm now.
Nice! Well done! I do know this feeling of panicˆˆ
Have fun with a now totally usable laptop!
Allright, my promised update: My Ram finally arrived and I happily put in the 8gb and… It went all south. Horrible boot time, bad performance the whole 9yards. Bios (thank you HP) didn’t even let me change the clockspeed of my ram. Anyways since I wanted to give my Wifes Laptop (her active one) an upgrade anyway I got the 8gb ram in her machine and that one works like a charm (-windows). So I had 4 gb left now (from her machine). Well, I stuck that one in this linux machine and they now play nicely.
So all in all a great success story! Thank you for encouraging me to upgrade it!
Highly recommend installing windows 10 LTSC on it. It’s windows 10, but not fucking awful.
Edit: never mind, I see you already have Ubuntu on it. Good job.
