Which OS should I use for my old laptop?

[Gtrase]

I want to be able to browse the web with it and also I want to use its CD-ROM.

Specs;

2 GB RAM and probably DDR2 or DDR3

CPU: AMD E-Series E1-1200

[191x7]

Windows 10.

[jaslion]

Web browsing is gonna be incredibly slow regardless. A smartwatch is many times faster than this laptop :p.

 

But yeah with those specs windows 10 32bit can work but its just gonna be basically unuseably slow

 

It has give or take the performance of a 2.6ghz p4 or 1.4ghz pentium 3. Cpu's from 1999-2001

[mariushm]

I would say Windows 7, uses relatively little memory and you can still get most programs working on it. Disable all the visual effects on the menus, task bar, and so on, and it should feel snappy.

Windows 2003 with the latest service packs would probably be a step above Windows XP, you can disable most "server" services and make it run lean and fast and use little memory, under 64-128 MB just for the OS, and most Windows XP drivers will work on it. 

 

For both Windows 7 and 2003 there's a 32 bit version that in theory uses even less memory but in practice it's more like 10-20% less memory compared to the 64 bit version, and it's not worth losing the ability to run 64 bit applications. 

 

Windows XP is too old, and you get into programs that will refuse to run due to outdated libraries and features that don't exist (DirectX related, encryption, runtimes for .net etc) 

 

 

[jaslion]

44 minutes ago, mariushm said:

I would say Windows 7, uses relatively little memory and you can still get most programs working on it. Disable all the visual effects on the menus, task bar, and so on, and it should feel snappy.

Windows 2003 with the latest service packs would probably be a step above Windows XP, you can disable most "server" services and make it run lean and fast and use little memory, under 64-128 MB just for the OS, and most Windows XP drivers will work on it. 

 

For both Windows 7 and 2003 there's a 32 bit version that in theory uses even less memory but in practice it's more like 10-20% less memory compared to the 64 bit version, and it's not worth losing the ability to run 64 bit applications. 

 

Windows XP is too old, and you get into programs that will refuse to run due to outdated libraries and features that don't exist (DirectX related, encryption, runtimes for .net etc) 

 

 

Course this comes with the stipulation of dont sifn in anywhere or anything like that as these are unsupported oses with known security holes

[mariushm]

Like omg, what state secrets someone's gonna steal from a shitty laptop... just don't do internet banking, don't open crypto wallets, don't save passwords in your browser and you'll be fine. 

If you get infected, nuke the ssd/drive and reinstall windows. 

 

Still useful laptop to watch movies or previously recorded tv episodes in bed (should play 720p content just fine), maybe read some good ebooks... it's not just facebook and memory consuming websites out there.

 

 

 

[Lord Szechenyi]

5 hours ago, Gtrase said:

I want to be able to browse the web with it and also I want to use its CD-ROM.

Specs;

2 GB RAM and probably DDR2 or DDR3

CPU: AMD E-Series E1-1200

https://lubuntu.net/

 

For browsing the web and using CDs, this will be the best OS for you

 

possibly xubuntu might be better, but it needs slightly higher sys reqs https://xubuntu.org/

[peotr26]

2 hours ago, Lord Szechenyi said:

https://lubuntu.net/

 

For browsing the web and using CDs, this will be the best OS for you

 

possibly xubuntu might be better, but it needs slightly higher sys reqs https://xubuntu.org/

Ubuntu, nowadays, only support 64bit CPU. You might want to try Peppermint OS, it is based on Debian, and it has an x86 version.

[Lord Szechenyi]

2 minutes ago, peotr26 said:

Ubuntu, nowadays, only support 64bit CPU. You might want to try Peppermint OS, it is based on Debian, and it has an x86 version.

I checked OP's CPU and it's 64bit

 

Also, lubuntu isn't exactly ubuntu, it's designed for older hardware.

[Alexeygridnev1993]

6 hours ago, mariushm said:

Like omg, what state secrets someone's gonna steal from a shitty laptop... just don't do internet banking, don't open crypto wallets, don't save passwords in your browser and you'll be fine. 

If you get infected, nuke the ssd/drive and reinstall windows. 

 

Still useful laptop to watch movies or previously recorded tv episodes in bed (should play 720p content just fine), maybe read some good ebooks... it's not just facebook and memory consuming websites out there.

 

 

 

So many "don't's". Why not use a lightweight Linux distro which will do exactly the same on this hardware (basic web browsing and typing documents) but won't have any security holes of unsupported versions of Windows?

 

An older release Lubuntu or Debian with LXDE will work just fine.

[bloodthirster]

Debian with XFCE is what I use for light installs.

[RollyShed]

You don't mention the make and model of the laptop. Why?

It is 64 bit so why are people suggesting 32 bit system?

 

The first thing is fit an SSD in place of the hard disk. I've only done about 40 laptops this way. An SSD is 10 times faster than a hard disk.

Next, install Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. Linux is faster and far more reliable.

By default it, Mint, will have a web browser and office suite plus a lot more and a lot more available.

No virus protection needed.

 

Oldest laptop I've done was a 2008 model.

What I commonly use when travelling, an ASUS T200 with 32GB of storage and 2GB of RAM with Linux Mint, Cinnamon desktop.

Neither of these, the storage or RAM, can be changed but it works and is reliable.

 

Changing from Windows to Linux use? Simply switch it on and carry on as if nothing had changed, that easy and exactly what happened to my partner after Microsoft wiped her computer. The most dangerous "viruses" are written by Microsoft and called Updates.

[The Hope]

On 2/9/2023 at 8:32 AM, Gtrase said:

I want to be able to browse the web with it and also I want to use its CD-ROM.

Specs;

2 GB RAM and probably DDR2 or DDR3

CPU: AMD E-Series E1-1200

For old and weak hardware, BSD is usually the best solution. Some systems I would recommend are GhostBSD, helloSystem, FreeBSD, and Dragonfly BSD. There are people who are happy with OpenBSD on very old hardware, but this is usually more powerful hardware than what you are using.

 

I can tell you my impressions with pulseaudio on Linux, I have used Linux for a long time on five different laptops/netbooks/desktops. A first impression I have is that the audio quality differs on Linux depending on which app and what type of connection you use (analog/HDMI/SPDIF etc.) I found the audio on Clear Linux terrible out-of- the-box on the analog (green) connection of my PC. With Ubuntu on other hardware I did an experiment with Quod Libet. You can easily get bitperfect sound through the settings of this audio player. I then compared this sound in bitperfect mode with FreeBSD's sound in bitperfect mode on the same hardware. And the sound sounded distorted on Ubuntu, quite noticeably distorted I mean. Other people could also hear this so it's not my imagination. On Arch Linux I found the audio better than on Ubuntu and Clear Linux, but not on the same level as FreeBSD either. I've used Arch Linux for a long time on several different types of hardware. In the end there is only one Linux setup where I managed to get decent sound out of Linux. This was a laptop with Fedora that I connected to the TV with HDMI, but I used an HDMI splitter that also had a SPDIF output to the 5.1 DTS Sony amp in combination with expensive Infinity speakers. Then in mpv media player I used the SPDIF passthrough option, and when I played movies that had DTS sound the sound was really impressive. But this is the only setup out of many different setups that accidentally delivered decent sound in Linux. So the overall picture is really not good, and I think windows usually has better audio than Linux.

 

It may be that Linux's audio is 'good enough' for you personally. But based on many other sources I can say it's not on par with FreeBSD's sound:

Why do people dislike PulseAudio?

Why is audio still so awful on linux?

So fast forward to 2007, when PulseAudio is actually unleashed upon the computers of everyone else except Lennart and his friends as it's adopted and enabled by default in Fedora 8. To put it mildly, nothing worked anymore. Very literally -- when we installed it at the crufty place where I held a part-time job there, it broke sound on every single one of the 10-15 different configurations we had, from laptops to desktops.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13381345

Why OSS sound quality is superior vs ALSA
http://ossnext.trueinstruments.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5811

OSS
https://linuxreviews.org/OSS

Open Sound System (OSS4) superior to ALSA
https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=95824.0

 

To give an example of what immediately strikes me: someone complains about the latency in Pipewire (Linux) in combination with Wine and Ableton Live. Guess my experience on FreeBSD with Ableton Live? It has extremely good audio quality and sounded exactly the same as on macOS. So I mean the latency on FreeBSD and wine was excellent. I had fewer audio problems with Ableton on FreeBSD via wine than on windows and macOS.

Other examples of people experiencing serious problems with the Linux audio stack:

 

 

 

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zvgev0/audio_stuttering_issues_with_kernel_611/

 

BSD's file systems are more mature and more integrated, and there are few parts of an operating system more important than a file system. With ZFS you have less chance of corrupt files in case of power loss, even if you don't use ECC RAM.

 

File system aside, BSD is more robust than Linux in other areas as well. I've been using Linux for over 10 years and with many distros it's not rare that you have a complete system crash. By that I mean you can no longer properly shut down or make the system respond, your only option is to turn off power to the system while the system is running. This is one of the worst things you can do with a PC.

 

On FreeBSD, I've never seen a full system crash. The session may crash on FreeBSD, but then you can press the power button briefly to get it to shut down properly. Or, for example, you can also switch to another virtual terminal, close the problematic session, and open a new one without restarting the computer.

These are not small or insignificant differences, but are actually about 'basic stability'. BSD fares much better there than Linux, macOS and windows.

 

The 'performance aspect' is also important for old and cheap hardware:

https://www.trustradius.com/reviews/freebsd-2021-07-28-17-37-18

 

youtube-dl is one of the most popular apps on github with over 117,000 stars. What I notice in MX Linux is that the download speed fluctuates between 45 and 85 kbps. On FreeBSD my download speed averages 9.5 mbps for the same videos using the exact same command. So the FreeBSD download speed in this app is frequently 200x faster, which makes the difference between waiting seconds for a download, or an hour. This is a known problem that has not yet been resolved in many Linux distros. MX Linux has been the most popular distro on distrowatch for years.

 

This is only a small fraction of the things where FreeBSD outperforms all other operating systems out there.

You can safely say that FreeBSD has always been the most qualitative operating system in the last decades.

[bloodthirster]

What? 

 

PA was a shit show when released but it's usable now.   I get nice clear audio out of my Schiit.   I can't think of a time I've personally had messed up audio that was SW caused.

 

In the over 20 years I've been using Linux I've legit kernel crashes countable on both my hands, outside of things that clearly aren't the kernels fault, like bad HW, modding the kernel etc.  Most of those were in the earlier days as well.   The kernel is pretty damn solid.

 

The BSDs are built as a complete package, but Linux has had a lot more time and money put into it in almost every aspect.  It's important not to downplay that.   Just look at kvm vs bhyve.  How many more features and processors are supported in kvm than bhyve?

 

Also that's one program that works better in BSD.  You can literally find tons of Linux programs that don't even build or run in BSD.  That's extreme cherry picking.

 

You fall to mention that in BSD there's isn't as much documentation or the smaller subset of SW on it or the lack of a lot of drivers or...   BSD has a lot of negatives as well.

 

I get that you like BSD but there's much better arguments for it than cherry picking issues, using strawmans and other weird reasons.   Simping for an OS doesn't do anyone any good. 

[The Hope]

16 hours ago, bloodthirster said:

What? 

 

PA was a shit show when released but it's usable now.   I get nice clear audio out of my Schiit.   I can't think of a time I've personally had messed up audio that was SW caused.

I said the following in the comment you replied to: It may be that Linux's audio is 'good enough' for you personally.

 

In some situations, Linux can provide decent audio. Distro comes into play, configuration comes into play, hardware comes into play, and even other factors come into play.

 

My point is that FreeBSD and macOS give noticeably more detailed sound out-of-the-box and overall than Linux and windows. I would rank Linux as the operating system that usually has the worst sound quality and also the most sound problems. 

 

You can do a blind test where you let someone play a demo song from both systems without knowing which demo belongs to which system. I would be very surprised that you would like the sound in the demo of the Linux system better. I'd like to do such a large-scale test sometime, but I already know in advance that >90% of people will prefer FreeBSD.

 

Quote

The kernel is pretty damn solid.

Hasn't Linus Torvalds been saying for years that the new generations can't program anymore? And how terrible are the skills of the C++ programmers? As far as I know everyone should know by now that the quality has gone down over the years.

 

Use an Nvidia gtx 650 GPU and use Clear Linux with the nouveau drivers. Then play Flight Gear on both Wayland and Xorg.

Here you have your full system crash where Linux becomes completely unresponsive over and over again. You have no option to shut down your system or close the session. All you can do is pull the plug from your computer while it is running.

 

It happens faster on Wayland than on Xorg. With Wayland it already happens during the loading of the map.

 

Quote

Also that's one program that works better in BSD.  You can literally find tons of Linux programs that don't even build or run in BSD.  That's extreme cherry picking.

FreeBSD's Linux emulation layer works great in most cases. And I rarely use that emulation layer. FreeBSD currently has 35 000 default packages, almost 60 000 if you count the different versions of the same package. (The fact that FreeBSD has many versions of apps such as PostgreSQL, PHP, Lua, etc is extremely useful) .Arch Linux currently has about 13 798 standard packages in the repos, and there may be several versions of the same package among them. Those numbers are more than clear enough, aren't they?

 

You also know that using AUR is not practically feasible on every hardware and can sometimes be very time consuming and intensive for the CPU? 

Those numbers are very relevant.

 

Quote

You fall to mention that in BSD there's isn't as much documentation or the smaller subset of SW on it or the lack of a lot of drivers or...   BSD has a lot of negatives as well.

Documentation is one of the things FreeBSD and OpenBSD excel at.

 

It's competitive with Arch Linux's documentation and 99% of the other Linux distros don't have documentation that's competitive with Arch's.

 

On FreeBSD and OpenBSD, tutorials that are 10 or sometimes 20 years old often still work, as little has changed in how the tech works over the years. This is in contrast to Linux where 5 year old tutorials are usually not useful anymore, because things are always changing, often for no good reason. 

 

Quote

or the smaller subset of SW on it or the lack of a lot of drivers or...

Who discontinued support for 32-bit and many other things? Linux or BSD?

 

Recently I read again of a person who had a problem with his Intel CPU and simply replaced his motherboard and switched to an AMD CPU. Linux and windows stopped working. FreeBSD worked perfectly. FreeBSD stability and SW and drivers can't be any better I suspect.

 

FreeBSD is more compatible with just about any hardware more than 3 years old than Linux.

 

Clear Linux and similar systems don't support a huge amount of old CPUs to do software optimizations that make them about as fast as FreeBSD, which is compatible with all those old CPUs. Really beautiful your Linux systems.

[RollyShed]

The Hope mentions two things, sound and freezing/stopping. As for sound, I've never had a problem with the dozens of computers I've dealt with. Nvidia video cards can be a problem and cause freezing. As the OP has an old laptop this should not be a problem and simply plugging in a couple of speakers with a bit of amplification should give plenty of reasonable sound.

 

Again, going on about 32 bit systems when the OP has a 64 bit laptop, why?

 

As said before, fit an SSD and load Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop and use it. Simple.

[Labeled]

With hardware that old, maybe Debian is a good option for you.

[The Hope]

On 2/11/2023 at 9:39 PM, RollyShed said:

The Hope mentions two things, sound and freezing/stopping. As for sound, I've never had a problem with the dozens of computers I've dealt with. Nvidia video cards can be a problem and cause freezing. As the OP has an old laptop this should not be a problem and simply plugging in a couple of speakers with a bit of amplification should give plenty of reasonable sound.

I happen to know a number of Linux developers and several have already admitted that PulseAudio has many bugs and simply does not provide decent sound out-of-the-box in some popular Linux distros. According to these developers, PipeWire would solve this, but it still needs several years of development before it works optimally. An insightful question: why was PipeWire developed in the first place if PulseAudio would be as great as you claim?

 

Quote

Again, going on about 32 bit systems when the OP has a 64 bit laptop, why?

This was just in response to what someone had said, I didn't want to go on about this. But it is very helpful for Linux users to know the reality that many distros no longer support 32-bit systems, and last year it was planned to completely drop i486 support in all Linux distros.

 

It's also useful to know that well-optimized systems like Clear Linux don't support many of the 64-bit processors that FreeBSD supports. So, just to be clear, this is not about 32-bit systems. Clear Linux doesn't support many old 64-bit Core-i3 processors from Intel. And Clear Linux also doesn't support fairly recent 64-bit CPUs like the Intel Celeron N3350. In Firefox, Clear Linux and FreeBSD are similar in CPU performance. If you're going to use a Linux distro other than Clear Linux on old hardware, browser performance is almost always going to be less than if you're using FreeBSD. Debian, Ubuntu, AlmaLinux, Fedora, etc give something like 10%-35% less performance in browsers than Clear Linux..

 

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As said before, fit an SSD and load Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop and use it. Simple.

I wouldn't recommend this to run a full desktop environment on that super weak hardware. I would rather recommend a window manager such as dwm. In MotionMark, dwm gives around 25% higher performance than eg the Mate desktop. On very weak hardware you can use this extra graphics performance anyway.

[TorC]

I used Zenwalk on old PCs and got decent performance in the past.  What with the new Slackware 15, I'd say it is worth cheking out.  That 1.4GHz cpu concerns me.

 

There is also a new 32-bit spin on PCLOS called uplos .  don't know much but am curious about it re: old hardware. 

[RollyShed]

14 hours ago, The Hope said:

But it is very helpful for Linux users to know the reality that many distros no longer support 32-bit systems,

 

I wouldn't recommend this to run a full desktop environment on that super weak hardware. I would rather recommend a window manager such as dwm. In MotionMark, dwm gives around 25% higher performance than eg the Mate desktop. On very weak hardware you can use this extra graphics performance anyway.

The CPU specs are a 64 bit CPU so all of that 32 bit waffle has just added confusion to this thread.

 

An SSD and Linux Mint with Cinnamon is what I've put a over 40 laptops dating back to an old 2008 one.
Is 2008 old enough?
Did it work well? Yes
RAM? 2GB.

 

The OP has still failed to give the make and model of the computer.

[HeroRareheart]

On 2/9/2023 at 2:32 AM, Gtrase said:

I want to be able to browse the web with it and also I want to use its CD-ROM.

Specs;

2 GB RAM and probably DDR2 or DDR3

CPU: AMD E-Series E1-1200

I'd try Debian with a DE such xfce, it's a goid starting place.

[The Hope]

On 2/15/2023 at 3:47 AM, RollyShed said:

Is 2008 old enough?
Did it work well? Yes
RAM? 2GB.

I've explained that FreeBSD on older hardware usually has slightly higher CPU performance than most Linux distros, let's say that gives a 10% performance difference.

Furthermore, I also explained that MotionMark achieves 25% higher performance in dwm compared to a full desktop environment like Mate.

By taking those two things into account, you can achieve a total of 30% higher graphics performance, on hardware that has very poor graphics performance. Usually hardware from one generation to the next offers 15% higher performance on average, in recent years it has often been less as the miniaturization of nodes in wafers starts to hit hard limits.

So by following your advice you have the performance of 2 generations older hardware. I wouldn't define that as 'working well'.

 

Furthermore, you also have the fact that Cinnamon takes much longer to both login and launch apps than dwm on this (extremely) slow hardware. So you always lose a lot of time with your advice in three different ways: 1. during login 2. while starting an app 3. after starting the app while performing tasks that are CPU or GPU intensive. Most people I know see time as their most important resource.

[RollyShed]

9 hours ago, The Hope said:

Most people I know see time as their most important resource.

You mean they are impatient.

 

OK, there was that 10 minutes I wasted in 1985 while riding my bicycle from LA to Oregon (while fixing a tyre?) and another 7 minutes wasted when hiking in Nepal (stopping for another cup of tea). And maybe the 12 minutes wasted when sailing across the East China Sea. Yes, a lot of wasted time in my lifetime.

 

As for image resolution, just how much resolution in a laptop screen? Just how big a screen does the OP have?

[The Hope]

18 hours ago, RollyShed said:

OK, there was that 10 minutes I wasted in 1985 while riding my bicycle from LA to Oregon (while fixing a tyre?) and another 7 minutes wasted when hiking in Nepal (stopping for another cup of tea). And maybe the 12 minutes wasted when sailing across the East China Sea. Yes, a lot of wasted time in my lifetime.

 

As for image resolution, just how much resolution in a laptop screen? Just how big a screen does the OP have?

There are also many people who lose a lot of time in traffic jams. In cities such as Londen, for example, you lose more than 3 days of time every year that you are just stuck in traffic, on average. If you start adding up all the other things, you can quickly add up to a lot of days every year that you're just sitting around waiting.

 

I just realized that I also forgot to mention another aspect: active RAM usage. On FreeBSD dwm has about 88 MB of active RAM usage according to 'top'. The MATE desktop, which is lighter than Cinnamon, Gnome and KDE Plasma, has 320 MB of active RAM usage. Or a difference of 232 MB. If you have a system that only has 2000MB of RAM, that's anything but a minor difference. In itself, this is a good reason to never use a full desktop environment on this type of hardware.

[AmoldyBuffalo]

I think Linux mint xfce will serve you quite well. It's probably the lightest experience you could get without having to learn an entirely new desktop paradigm.