I tried Linux Lite[0] in a VM, and there was an awful bug where after setting up a disk encryption password, it wouldn't decrypt when I went to login, so I just abandoned my little experiment. I really should submit a bug report about that.
I did install pkgsrc on Ubuntu to get around snap but building anything took such a long time even on modern hardware. But that was building all the dependencies from scratch. After that it should take less time.
But note, if OpenBSD is installed on a "very" lightweight PC, you may need to disable re-linking of the kernel :) I thought I saw issues with this in the mailing lists if less than 1G memory.
I think NetBSD is the champion with OpenBSD a rather close 2nd.
It's sad that the 'light-weight-ness' of a distro seems to superficially only be measured on how much RAM it uses, instead of CPU load or disk I/O which have a much bigger impact on how snappy an OS feels than RAM, as most linux distros don't use that much RAM anyway to make a difference once you launch a memory hog like Chrome, but they can hit the CPU and disk hard enough to make a dent on performance, especially on older systems with HDD and slow CPUs.
I agree... so if you use the GUI, the window manager has a lot to do with it (hence the other posters comment about wayland). The author also notes the size of the download/distro, which is not equal to install size. If you wanted to go really crazy, perhaps install gentoo and only put in the packages you absolutely need?
I still find this site terribly useful, and parse through distros probably once a month. https://distrowatch.com/
Yes, this is greatly increased on older CPUs that aren't that rich in cores, thus the current heavy multi-processing takes an heavy toll on them, basically why threads used to be favoured back when they were modern.
For older desktops, soon it will be "anything not running Wayland" as I don't own a discrete GPU that works with Wayland (my 7 year old laptop with Intel HD Graphics 520 runs it fine, but any ATI/AMD card too old to run AMDGPU is not supported.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Yes, support for 386s was dropped near version 6 I believe. You could use such a version, or if you want a Unix-like on a 8088 or 80286 without proper memory protection, use ELKS. Although for a proper experience, I would just use DOS and forget about multitasking. DOS is blazing fast on a 386.
Of course, the real question is what to do with such machines once you get an OS running on them.
Very happy Slax user (recovery from USB stick only, not as a daily driver). Works great on older laptops, even from USB booting is pretty quick and the (quite basic, but very functional) UI is pretty snappy. It has both 64 and 32 bit distributions, and uses apt as a package manager so it's easy to pick up if you know ubuntu/debian (and easy to search online for packages, compared to less used package managers).
Would definitely suggest to anyone trying to squeeze another few years out of an old machine.
And in what way does the one cause the other? Slackware Linux 3 was about that size on disk and it ran perfectly well on a machine with 4MiB of main memory.
Defined as what? Even a bottom-of-the-line NUC with a dual core Celeron and only half the memory populated, using a 4GiB SO-DIMM even though at this point those cost more than 8GiB modules, would be more than plenty to run any popular distro.
Can anyone recommend a benchmark suite that can profile desktop performance across these old distributions?
I find performance heavily dependent on specific quirks eg puppy Linux running from ram (great), zero optimisation of the woeful gma950 graphics found in old netbooks (deal breaker)
Geekbench does some pretty comparable CPU + GPU prowess tests on multiple operating systems. I'm not sure how comparable the Geekbench compute scores are between platforms (Android vs Mac vs PC) because Android uses Vulkan+EGL, Mac uses Metal, and PC uses CUDA/Vulkan/OpenGL, but comparing within the same category the performance comparisons seem right.
You need some modern level of hardware acceleration for that, though, and platforms like gma950 just don't have the hardware to run that stuff. llvmpipe can fix a lot of compatibility issues but your CPU and GPU score will end up very close together.
Hobby projects on super old / free hardware was/is fun. I remember using dumpster desktops as a student. I could SSH to my home PC from school. Ran a webserver. Even wrote C code to generate HTML for a website to host my photos. Fun times.
All my current desktops are ~8 year old corporate cast-offs.
Fun as a hobby, but power draw of older computers is unlikely to make using them financially or environmentally friendly long term. One can get a stick PC for $100 or a Linux capable Chromebook for $200 and these will be faster and vastly more power efficient compared to old hardware.
For explicit hobby use, I prefer tinkering with software common at the time these systems were new. Then I get to play with different UI and some apps/games/peripherals which do not work with emulators, or are better on the real thing.
"Newer old hardware" might be different, but it's also less likely to need special distros. I have a 2013 Macbook Air running Sonoma thanks to Open Core Legacy Patcher. Everything works fine with patched stock OS. But practicality of Pentium 4 is a stretch.
Got an older MBP in my house, older OS. Got a warning on that that we won't get newer Chrome. It's almost frozen in time. Netflix will stop working soon I've heard. As long as Jellyfin works we'll keep it.
No complaints, but I mostly use mine for web/video/e-mail/casual image editing. I do have an even older 17 inch Macbook Pro that I keep on Mojave (using another toolkit from dosdude1) to play old 32 bit Mac games.
It's also not a given that post Big Sur versions would be even slower, Apple's optimization efforts can fluctuate release by release.
Using inefficient old electronics is significantly more environmentally friendly compared to scraping it and using something new.
The vast majority of energy used and environment damage caused by computers happen when they are manufactured. The lifetime energy use afterwards is a tiny fraction.
I would be very surprised if this was true with a compute stick as a replacement for a 100 watt old desktop with hardware that does not implement proper power management. Just how bad is compute stick manufacturing process?
it holds true within the same class of hardware, and not only for computers.
the carbon footprint of producing a new car can hardly be offset through the efficiency of a new one. substitute an old pickup truck for a new three-door ev, totally worth it for the environment.
I have family members who buy new computers every few years just so they can play web-based games on Facebook with reasonable performance. This is quite understandable given how poorly the Facebook website performs even with modern browsers with modern JavaScript engines but on older hardware. This IMHO is one of the dark side of JavaScript -- it may 'run everywhere' but it certainly doesn't perform well everywhere. It does not matter other sites work (e.g. HN) work just fine on older hardware, the Joe Public just want Facebook, Gmail, etc to work.
> The real bottleneck is a web browser that can render the modern web and there is no real solution for that.
I think ChromeOS solves that problem quite smartly, by starting the bare necessities to launch the browser and nothing else. No more moving parts, just the web, which is what 99% of computer use seems to be these days anyway.
ChromeOS Flex seems to work pretty well for giving old laptops a second life. It won't run on your Pentium II but there are plenty of computers out there that'll work great.
With Microsoft's plans for Windows 12, I can imagine a cloud-based Windows that you can use any old laptop with. As long as you have decent WiFi and a thin client loaded, you'll end up with laptops where hardware h264 decoding will matter more than CPU power and RAM.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] thread[0] https://www.linuxliteos.com/
Non-UNIX systems like KolibriOS, Haiku or Aros tend to fly on hardware where UNIX does not.
On an old enough system, FreeDOS, ELKS or Fuzix.
Both support binary third party packages.
But building on Linux will also take just as long, so really a non-issue :)
I did install pkgsrc on Ubuntu to get around snap but building anything took such a long time even on modern hardware. But that was building all the dependencies from scratch. After that it should take less time.
But note, if OpenBSD is installed on a "very" lightweight PC, you may need to disable re-linking of the kernel :) I thought I saw issues with this in the mailing lists if less than 1G memory.
I think NetBSD is the champion with OpenBSD a rather close 2nd.
I still find this site terribly useful, and parse through distros probably once a month. https://distrowatch.com/
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.
Even better: Devuan with XFCE
If Linux isn't a requirement, OpenBSD is super lightweight as well.
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.)
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.
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.
NetBSD runs great on old hardware. Indeed, supporting old hardware is one of the main goals of the project.
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/
Of course, the real question is what to do with such machines once you get an OS running on them.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/07/dos-b...
Would definitely suggest to anyone trying to squeeze another few years out of an old machine.
An odd comment. Isn’t that the case for all these distributions?
Edit to add: I would say a more interesting factor is being able to test drive from a USB drive without having to install anything.
The article reads to me like it was (partially) written by AI.
Either written by ChatGPT or author is quite confused.
1 electron or chrome session and you're done.
I find performance heavily dependent on specific quirks eg puppy Linux running from ram (great), zero optimisation of the woeful gma950 graphics found in old netbooks (deal breaker)
You need some modern level of hardware acceleration for that, though, and platforms like gma950 just don't have the hardware to run that stuff. llvmpipe can fix a lot of compatibility issues but your CPU and GPU score will end up very close together.
All my current desktops are ~8 year old corporate cast-offs.
The earliest C-MS!
Sometimes I crack me up
I use arch btw
For explicit hobby use, I prefer tinkering with software common at the time these systems were new. Then I get to play with different UI and some apps/games/peripherals which do not work with emulators, or are better on the real thing.
"Newer old hardware" might be different, but it's also less likely to need special distros. I have a 2013 Macbook Air running Sonoma thanks to Open Core Legacy Patcher. Everything works fine with patched stock OS. But practicality of Pentium 4 is a stretch.
My MBA early 2017 (i5/8GB/256) is always nagging me to upgrade to Big Sur, but I did that once (via clean install) and it was terribly slow.
Within a few days I was clean installing 10.15 again, back to a fast snappy experience.
Brew started compiling everything recently though so migrated most things to macports...
It's also not a given that post Big Sur versions would be even slower, Apple's optimization efforts can fluctuate release by release.
There are many places in the world where this isnt true.
The vast majority of energy used and environment damage caused by computers happen when they are manufactured. The lifetime energy use afterwards is a tiny fraction.
the carbon footprint of producing a new car can hardly be offset through the efficiency of a new one. substitute an old pickup truck for a new three-door ev, totally worth it for the environment.
The real bottleneck is a web browser that can render the modern web and there is no real solution for that.
I think ChromeOS solves that problem quite smartly, by starting the bare necessities to launch the browser and nothing else. No more moving parts, just the web, which is what 99% of computer use seems to be these days anyway.
ChromeOS Flex seems to work pretty well for giving old laptops a second life. It won't run on your Pentium II but there are plenty of computers out there that'll work great.
With Microsoft's plans for Windows 12, I can imagine a cloud-based Windows that you can use any old laptop with. As long as you have decent WiFi and a thin client loaded, you'll end up with laptops where hardware h264 decoding will matter more than CPU power and RAM.
Both support modified Chromium for OOTB hardware video acceleration, known laptop backlight tweaks and fit on 1GB flash drive with 40% free space.