My first time....

[JoshuaMac]

Ok. Long story/rant. Pulled out my old Hp Pavillion g6. Ever since I installed windows 10 the drivers for my wireless adapter stopped working (intell centrino 1000). After a few hours I finally decided to switch to Linux. The recent video on switching suggested pop. After installing pop I started tracking down a driver and easily found it. While trying to install I got frustrated as most of Ubuntus features for adding drivers and such were removed. Fast forward several more hours and another install this time purist Ubuntu (20.04.3) and this is glitchy and slow on my old system. And still having a hard time installing the stupid driver. Anyone want to make any suggestions? I may go back to pop and try again. I did quick research and found I can make the interface very win 95/98 wich is my end goal. Once I have a solid system I have other machines that need new operating systems. 

[mahyar]

i suggest you try manjaro

because one way or another if there exist a driver its highly likely to work on manjaro

[King Mughal]

I am no expert on Linux distros but been daily driving MX Linux for at least 3 to 4 years and found it to be really good,

I not going to say to move to MX Linux but with my low spec computer I think works really good.

The reason I choose to use MX Linux is because it didn't use to much memory and not a lot of cpu usage.

I do occasionally play games using Wine and I mostly browse the web and use WPS Office.

Another reason I choose MX Linux is because it was debian based and Ubuntu which I think is the most popular distro is debian based too.

The good thing about that is if there is any problem you just do a quick google search there is alway a solution.

 

 

 

[chrono76]

1 hour ago, mahyar said:

i suggest you try manjaro

because one way or another if there exist a driver its highly likely to work on manjaro

My opinion is to go with Endeavour OS if you want to have the Arch experience, Manjaro is a little bloated for me but if you use the software it comes with, I guess its fine

My suggestion would be to use Linux Mint or MX Linux to have something more stable.

[finest feck fips]

3 hours ago, JoshuaMac said:

After installing pop I started tracking down a driver and easily found it. While trying to install I got frustrated as most of Ubuntus features for adding drivers and such were removed. [...] And still having a hard time installing the stupid driver. Anyone want to make any suggestions?

How is anyone supposed to give you advice when you haven't mentioned the driver, or why you need it, or what behavior your computer is exhibiting for lack of the driver?

What hardware on that machine is currently not working, or was not working on the most recent PopOS release,for want of a driver?

[mahyar]

7 hours ago, chrono76 said:

My opinion is to go with Endeavour OS if you want to have the Arch experience, Manjaro is a little bloated for me but if you use the software it comes with, I guess its fine

My suggestion would be to use Linux Mint or MX Linux to have something more stable.

not because of its arch experience

driver support is a lot better on manjaro because of its specialized utility 

[Willa]

9 hours ago, JoshuaMac said:

Ok. Long story/rant. Pulled out my old Hp Pavillion g6. Ever since I installed windows 10 the drivers for my wireless adapter stopped working (intell centrino 1000). After a few hours I finally decided to switch to Linux. The recent video on switching suggested pop. After installing pop I started tracking down a driver and easily found it. While trying to install I got frustrated as most of Ubuntus features for adding drivers and such were removed. Fast forward several more hours and another install this time purist Ubuntu (20.04.3) and this is glitchy and slow on my old system. And still having a hard time installing the stupid driver. Anyone want to make any suggestions? I may go back to pop and try again. I did quick research and found I can make the interface very win 95/98 wich is my end goal. Once I have a solid system I have other machines that need new operating systems. 

Does your system have a spinning disk hard drive? I.e. not an SSD?

If so, Ubuntu will be a bit heavy for that. You might try Xubuntu (uses the XFCE desktop environment) or Lubuntu (uses the LXDE/LXQT desktop environment) instead, they are different flavours of Ubuntu and are made to use with older and slower hardware.

I've used Lubuntu on my NextBook Flexx 11 and it ran quite smoothly, waaaaaay quicker than the Windows 10 it came with, and that's a very underpowered machine with slow disk speeds despite technically using flash storage (something to do with how it's run basically off an SD card or slow internal eMMC). I currently use the LXDE/LXQT desktop environment on one of my old PowerBook G4 laptops which runs Debian. That laptop has an extremely slow spinning disk hard drive connected using PATA (precursor to SATA) and other than a very slow boot time, it's actually not a bad experience.

 

Apparently KDE these days is much more optimized for speed than GNOME and actually quite lightweight, but I'm operating off of hearsay and rumor rather than benchmarks, sorry (anecdotally, it does feel extremely quick and snappy on my Thinkpad X220T...however I have an SSD in that machine soooo). Anyway, Kubuntu (flavor of Ubuntu running KDE instead of GNOME) might be worth checking out too.

 

If you want cool inspiration and examples of customized *nix installs, this subreddit is amazing for that.

[beace]

TL;DR Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and Manjaro, to name a few, have various "flavors" you could try. Some of them are less demanding, and may improve your laptop's performance.

 

I can't really say much about drivers, sorry, but I'll say that you can still get some decent performance from your old machine with Linux.

 

Don't forget that Ubuntu, Mint and a Fedora, for example, have various flavors available, which are essentially various editions with different desktop environments. Some of those flavors are less-resource hungry than the others, such as XFCE or LXDE/LXQT.

 

If you're willing to dive a bit deeper and tinker more with your operating system, Manjaro has community-built flavors with Tiling Window Managers, which are even less resource-hungry than lightweight desktop environments already are. I stared with Linux Mint XFCE on a 2-core, sub 2 GHz laptop with 4 GB RAM (though it does have a dedicated GPU, but it's a weaker one anyway), then putting Arch with i3-gaps (timing window manager) on it, and both of those installs really impressed me with their speed and how usable the old guy got again, especially compared to Windows it had before.

 

I've seen a lot of people around here having some issues with Pop OS!, which is kinda weird given how recommemed it is for starters. Those kind of issues that I don't think I've seen as much with other, longer-running beginner-friendly distros.