Anyone know minimum requirements to run Ubuntu. The main flavor as well as any other you want to share. Also, suggest any other distrio for a 15 year old laptop. Thanks.

  • monobot@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    It would be useful to share hardware specs so that we can really recommend something for it. You will get best results by trying out multiple distributions and get a feel. Generally, almost any linux will do, problem will be browser so saving as much ram for it would be useful.

    First suggestion: get some used SSD for it if it does not have it already (even 64GB will do), second get more RAM if possible.

    Depending on the user I would first go with Linux Mint XFCE, that is lightest easy to use distro I have found.

    For someone more advanced/less expectations Crunchbang++ is very light.

    • Shareni@programming.dev
      1·
      1 year ago

      Generally, almost any linux will do

      That really depends on the hardware. A year or two ago a friend asked me to install Linux on his ancient laptop. If I remember correctly it has x86 BIOS and CPU, or a x86 bios and x86_64 CPU.

      In any case, it had a hardware combination that made it next to impossible to find a distro that supports it. I tried a few Debian derivatives, arch, void, maybe fedora, and some distros I found in top 10 distro lists for old PCs. The only one that I got to both install and boot was Bodhi Linux. Never heard about it before or after, and it gave up on updating like half a year later.

      • Cegorach@feddit.de
        1·
        1 year ago

        sounds like some of those asus transformer devices :D

        in that case your problem isn’t so much finding a distro to support that PC, but getting ANY distro to boot on it. It’s possible and takes pretty much the same steps for any distro - it’s just a horrible task for all cases.

      • monobot@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        Link is showing some other comment, but I think you got nice suggestions in the thread.

        Try out multiple distros, depending on experience and easines of use you expect.

        Go with 32bit even if cpu is 64bit (which looks it is not) sinc it will use a bit less RAM.

        I think you can make usable experience, I have i5 second gen with 10GB of ram (with gentoo, but Mint XFCE runs nicely too).

        Good luck and update us on experience!