Linux distro for old laptop (2025 remake)

[porina]

I asked this question before about 18 months ago, but with the EOL of Win10 getting closer it is time to revisit this more seriously.

 

Laptop specs:

CPU: i5 460M - 2 core 4 threads, 2.53 base, 2.80 turbo GHz

Ram: 8GB DDR3 1333

GPU: Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series 1GB VRAM

SSD: I have spare SATA SSDs I can swap in for a fresh install.

 

Possible use cases:

• General web stuff including Google apps
• Watching streamed video (YouTube mainly)
• See what games works on Steam on this age hardware?
• I want safe, easy, reliable as opposed to bleeding edge. This isn't a new device!

Anything else to consider?

 

The distro I ended up trying last time was Manjaro + Gnome which wasn't a great experience.

 

Old thread:

 

[strange13930]

5 minutes ago, porina said:

I asked this question before about 18 months ago, but with the EOL of Win10 getting closer it is time to revisit this more seriously.

 

Laptop specs:

CPU: i5 460M - 2 core 4 threads, 2.53 base, 2.80 turbo GHz

Ram: 8GB DDR3 1333

GPU: Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series 1GB VRAM

SSD: I have spare SATA SSDs I can swap in for a fresh install.

 

Possible use cases:

• General web stuff including Google apps
• Watching streamed video (YouTube mainly)
• See what games works on Steam on this age hardware?
• I want safe, easy, reliable as opposed to bleeding edge. This isn't a new device!

Anything else to consider?

 

The distro I ended up trying last time was Manjaro + Gnome which wasn't a great experience.

 

Old thread:

 

you could try mint or ubuntu I got both working on a MacBook Air from 2014. specs: i5-3427u 2 core 1.8 Ghz, 4 gb of ram, the igpu for graphics  

[Haswellx86]

arch

 

anything else is a mathematically proven wrong answer

 

except artix which could be better

[spacepickle]

I really like Lubuntu. It really nails the safe, easy, and reliable aspects of your requirements here. Everything is simple and intuitive, with little to no CLI needed to do pretty much anything. I suspect support for games would not be amazing though. 

[porina]

12 minutes ago, strange13930 said:

you could try mint or ubuntu I got both working on a MacBook Air from 2014. currently checking the MacBooks specs

I'll look at Mint since I vaguely recall Ubuntu did some shady things in the past. If I understand correctly Cinnamon is the heaviest, so if it is too much for my hardware I may drop to the other variations. In a quick look my CPU is from 2010 so it'll be older.

 

8 minutes ago, Haswellx86 said:

arch

 

anything else is a mathematically proven wrong answer

Arch has a reputation as not beginner friendly. Would you care to expand why I should look at it more vs other distros?

 

7 minutes ago, spacepickle said:

I really like Lubuntu. It really nails the safe, easy, and reliable aspects of your requirements here. Everything is simple and intuitive, with little to no CLI needed to do pretty much anything. I suspect support for games would not be amazing though. 

Looks like a lightweight derivation of Ubuntu. I'll consider that alongside Mint.

 

 

General question: is Steam usually in the default repos for distros, need to manually add from another source, or download/install like Windows? I can't remember how it worked last time.

[WereCat]

You will probably get many different suggestions so it's hard to decide.

 

I fell in love with Fedora GNOME on laptops, it's just great imo. I don't know how heavy it is on old HW, oldest I've used it on is dads notebook with i7 6600U 2C/4T and 12GB of RAM, works fine there.

 

As was already mentioned in previous topics, Dash to Dock is probably the most essential addon for Gnome (in my case the only addon I use).

 

In case of Fedora you will have to install media codecs with RPM Fusion, the guide can be found there if you decide to go for it:

 

To enable free and non-free repos: https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

To install media codecs: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia

 

And that's about the only thing you need to get Fedora running properly.

___

This is how dash to dock looks like, by default it auto hides when you full screen application and pops up if you move your mouse to the bottom of screen.

 

Spoiler

 

___

 

and yes, you can disable mouse acceleration:

 

 

 

Anyhow, I also hated Manjaro and I've tried KDE distros and I just preffer GNOME as I realized that I end up adjusting them to what GNOME comes with by default so not sure if I'm niche or weird...

 

_____

 

 

For a very, very old PC I once used ZorinOS, that PC was so old it only had PCI slots and IDE drives. THe system ran well on it, that was maybe a year ago. I believe ZorinOS is based on Ubuntu so should have wide application support as well. If that's your cup of tea.

 

[YoungBlade]

23 minutes ago, porina said:

General question: is Steam usually in the default repos for distros, need to manually add from another source, or download/install like Windows? I can't remember how it worked last time.

Steam is available for Ubuntu as a Snap package, so if you go with Lubuntu you can get it that way. In some ways this is recommended, as it keeps Steam self-contained and theoretically more up-to-date, but I know that Snaps are controversial, so some folks avoid them on principle.

 

It is in the normal repos as well, but because Ubuntu is not a rolling release, it does mean that the package might be out of date compared to what would be available if you got Steam directly from Valve.

 

It is also in Mint's repos - I installed it on my secondary laptop that is running Mint.

 

If you did want to install it as a Snap on Mint, you have the ability to set them up since it is based on Ubuntu, but it doesn't support Snaps out of the box.

[porina]

9 minutes ago, WereCat said:

You will probably get many different suggestions so it's hard to decide.

Suggestions are good, since there is too much choice and I will overlook things if trying this myself. This reminds me, I used to go to Distrowatch and they're still going! Looks like they never updated the website design since the last time I visited decades ago. I remember the Google vs Oracle lawsuit over APIs was going on around then, and that was 2010!

 

9 minutes ago, WereCat said:

As was already mentioned in previous topics, Dash to Dock is probably the most essential addon for Gnome (in my case the only addon I use).

I vaguely recall that from my run with Manjaro previously. It was broken on that.

 

9 minutes ago, WereCat said:

In case of Fedora you will have to install media codecs with RPM Fusion, the guide can be found there if you decide to go for it:

I hadn't considered this. Doesn't YT support VP9 and (for newer hardware) AV1? Randomly checking some videos on my desktop I also see AVC1 in use which I guess could be problematic. I wonder what codec support that old hardware would even support, or worst case would it run software decode?

 

9 minutes ago, WereCat said:

and yes, you can disable mouse acceleration:

In the past it seemed like a Gnome exposed setting so that would be a big plus.

 

9 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Anyhow, I also hated Manjaro and I've tried KDE distros and I just preffer GNOME as I realized that I end up adjusting them to what GNOME comes with by default so not sure if I'm niche or weird...

The version of Manjaro I tried was Gnome. 

 

9 minutes ago, WereCat said:

For a very, very old PC I once used ZorinOS, that PC was so old it only had PCI slots and IDE drives. THe system ran well on it, that was maybe a year ago. I believe ZorinOS is based on Ubuntu so should have wide application support as well. If that's your cup of tea.

This laptop is 1st gen Core i series, so I think we're in PCIe era at least.

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

I hadn't considered this. Doesn't YT support VP9 and (for newer hardware) AV1? Randomly checking some videos on my desktop I also see AVC1 in use which I guess could be problematic. I wonder what codec support that old hardware would even support, or worst case would it run software decode?

 

The version of Manjaro I tried was Gnome. 

 

This laptop is 1st gen Core i series, so I think we're in PCIe era at least.

I never had issue with for example YT working out of the box. Whether it was decoded in SW, no idea.

I'm talking more about if you download some media and want to play it, you will almost certainly run into issues if you don't install the media codecs.

 

I know, I worded that poorly. I meant that I hated Manjaro GNOME + I also tried KDE and I just ended up making it in GNOME image without the GNOME features.

 

It certainly has enough RAM at least to handle modern distro... the performance may vary though.

[porina]

6 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I'm talking more about if you download some media and want to play it, you will almost certainly run into issues if you don't install the media codecs.

Probably not a use case I have planned. Is there a Linux equivalent to VLC?

6 minutes ago, WereCat said:

It certainly has enough RAM at least to handle modern distro... the performance may vary though.

I don't plan to spend any money on this laptop but DDR3 is old enough to be cheap, even at 8GB modules. I don't even know if the laptop will support it. It is a Vaio from when Sony still made them so finding any info on it might not be possible.

[WereCat]

Just now, porina said:

Probably not a use case I have planned. Is there a Linux equivalent to VLC?

Yeah, it's called VLC  or if you want something even faster then MPV

 

1 minute ago, porina said:

I don't plan to spend any money on this laptop but DDR3 is old enough to be cheap, even at 8GB modules. I don't even know if the laptop will support it. It is a Vaio from when Sony still made them so finding any info on it might not be possible.

I think support will be fine. But the performance IDK, only way to find out is to try.

[porina]

1 minute ago, WereCat said:

Yeah, it's called VLC  or if you want something even faster then MPV

I never checked! I believe VLC has its own codecs built in so doesn't rely on OS support.

 

1 minute ago, WereCat said:

I think support will be fine. But the performance IDK, only way to find out is to try.

I don't recall perf being a problem when I tried Manjaro + Gnome in the past, but will see when I get around to it.

[WereCat]

3 minutes ago, porina said:

I never checked! I believe VLC has its own codecs built in so doesn't rely on OS support.

Codec topic on Linux is complicated due to licencing of some codecs, they are often not included in the Linux version of the app the same way as on Windows.

 

4 minutes ago, porina said:

I never checked! I believe VLC has its own codecs built in so doesn't rely on OS support.

 

I don't recall perf being a problem when I tried Manjaro + Gnome in the past, but will see when I get around to it.

Well, that depends on how recent version of GNOME it used and was it Wayland or X11? But in general, should be fine I think.

[Nayr438]

2 hours ago, porina said:

I'll look at Mint since I vaguely recall Ubuntu did some shady things in the past.

Linux Mint is just Ubuntu LTS with their own Cinnamon DE Repository, however you may benefit from Mint not using Snap Packages which are heavier than native packages. You also may benefit from using a DE that still primarily uses xorg-server rather than Wayland due to the age of the hardware, id probably avoid Desktop Environments like GNOME and KDE which are focused more around newer hardware and Wayland regardless of their marketing.

 

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

Codec topic on Linux is complicated due to licencing of some codecs

Fedora/RHEL, OpenSUSE/SUSE, and Manjaro nuke patent encumbered codecs any other distro should be fine.
For the H264 Codec there is a licensed Codec from Cisco called OpenH264 that many distros ship, Cisco covers all licensing fees, it's a limited implementation but should cover most usecases, it runs entirely on the CPU (software), and it can only decode. No idea how it would perform on the 460M however

 

1 hour ago, porina said:

I never checked! I believe VLC has its own codecs built in so doesn't rely on OS support.

Codecs in VLC can be disabled and it can use ffmpeg so that's not entirely true.

 

For both of these you can get around it by using Flatpak versions if you happen to use a distro that does disable support.
Also RPM Fusion was mentioned for Fedora but do be aware that it's entirely community maintained

 

You can check whats supported by your hardware on your distro with vainfo. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration#Verifying_VA-API

 

2 hours ago, porina said:

CPU: i5 460M - 2 core 4 threads, 2.53 base, 2.80 turbo GHz

GPU: Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series 1GB VRAM

 

Possible use cases:

• See what games works on Steam on this age hardware?

 

That Radeon Card will use the Legacy ATI Driver, in other words you are in unsupported territory. The iGPU falls in still semi supported territory. Both will however lack Vulkan Support. For a linux native OpenGL Application it may not be bad, for wine/proton however you will have to fall back to wined3d instead of dxvk/vkd3d which isn't known for being great.

[NoLeafClover]

The choice of desktop environment will likely make the biggest difference in resource consumption. So I will chip in by saying, perhaps controversially for some, that distro for the most part really doesn't matter.

 

Note that for example {K,L,X}ubuntu are all the exact same Ubuntu with KDE, LXDE, and XFCE respectively as the default desktop environment. Regardless of distro, you can always switch between any desktop environment, so long as it's available for that distro. Likewise, the various Fedora editions and spins are the exact same distro with a different default DE.

 

54 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

You also may benefit from using a DE that still primarily uses xorg-server rather than Wayland due to the age of the hardware, id probably avoid Desktop Environments like GNOME and KDE which are focused more around newer hardware and Wayland regardless of their marketing.

This is a very valid point and some distros are looking to drop support for GNOME and KDE on Xorg, even if upstream DE codebase still supports it. I think the upcoming Ubuntu non-LTS release might be one of them.

 

For videos, MPV was already suggested and I would second that - it's very lightweight and works flawlessly. MPV itself is primarily a "command line" software and has a very primitive user interface - SMPlayer is a great front-end for it.

 

Re Steam, I would recommend the Flatpak version. It's reliable, stable, and distro-agnostic. Ditto re VLC if you want to use it. The Flatpak version of Steam itself doesn't matter much as Steam will auto-update itself anyway.

 

If you're more philosophically inclined towards free software, I would suggest sticking to Flatpak and avoiding Canonical's half-properietary dung called Snap (might be more difficult on Ubuntu). If that's not of importance to you, both are mostly interchangeable, though Flatpak is perhaps a more popular choice outside of Ubuntu.

[Haswellx86]

14 hours ago, porina said:

Arch has a reputation as not beginner friendly. Would you care to expand why I should look at it more vs other distros?

You decide what goes in your system, good for old systems. Also installing Arch is easy, or else its a skill issue.

[porina]

Just now, Haswellx86 said:

else its a skill issue.

There is a reason I don't play souls-like games. I'll put Arch in the same box.

[Haswellx86]

1 hour ago, porina said:

There is a reason I don't play souls-like games. I'll put Arch in the same box.

Wtf? They both have nothing in common. Just follow this guide and it's easy. It's actually fun as well.

[thevictor390]

2 hours ago, Haswellx86 said:

Wtf? They both have nothing in common. Just follow this guide and it's easy. It's actually fun as well.

You gotta realize that 99.9% of people find absolutely nothing fun on that webpage. As someone who mostly understands what it's saying, it looks pretty miserable.

I even use Arch. But I didn't do any of that. I ran archinstall like a heathen.

[Nayr438]

I did forget something that may be relevant here. We are in the middle of adopting x86_64-v3 which essentially drops support for anything older than haswell. As of right now only RedHat has fully adopted this in RHEL and CentOS, however Ubuntu has internal builds and tooling in their repos for it already, OpenSUSE started building packages for it, Fedora has been discussing it and is part of the RedHat family. This could be something we see a major adoption in soon or it could get dragged out for the next decade like Wayland adoption. I think a lot of people are watching to see how it goes on RHEL and CachyOS before fully pushing it. If longevity is a concern however I would try to stick with something like Ubuntu 24.04 LTS which is supported until 2029 or Debian. Debian is pretty much the last to make any major changes, they still support 32bit systems for reference. One big downside to Debian is packages are old and for this reason I don't typically recommend it for Desktop Use, but here it may be a decent fit.
If Mint is still a primary consideration they do offer a Officially Supported Debian build known as Linux Mint Debian Edition and while they do build their regular editions off Ubuntu they are based on 2 year cycles of Ubuntu LTS rather than the full support period.

Just wanted to throw that out there so you are not caught by surprise, everyone has been rather quite about it.

[porina]

3 hours ago, Haswellx86 said:

Wtf? They both have nothing in common. Just follow this guide and it's easy. It's actually fun as well.

There's can I do it, and there's do I want to. That sort of thing might have been ok 30 years ago. We have moved on.

[NoLeafClover]

1 hour ago, Nayr438 said:

We are in the middle of adopting x86_64-v3 which essentially drops support for anything older than haswell.

I did think of mentioning this in my post as well, as it's a fair point. But I don't think this is a significant concern. There have been various assessments of the benefits of switching to -v3 as the target, but the overall benefits appear to be negligible. I do expect it to happen at some point, though, but I doubt it will be any time soon. I wouldn't be surprised if the jump is made instead to -v4 as it introduces AVX512 and would make far more sense if and when the time is right. 

 

In any case, I suspect most distros that adopt -v3 will provide -v2 binaries for some time to come. Gentoo, for example, provides both.

 

It's also important to note that it doesn't mean that all applications will necessarily break. Only binaries that use the additional instructions required by v3 could, and many applications will also have runtime checks too.

[Nayr438]

4 minutes ago, NoLeafClover said:

It's also important to note that it doesn't mean that all applications will necessarily break. Only binaries that use the additional instructions required by v3 could, and many applications will also have runtime checks too.

It really depends on how they adopt it, newer builds of RHEL 10 and CentOS 10 wont even install on older hardware. Anything before haswell is entirely unsupported.
When Canonical was asked about it in the past they didn't really have an answer on how it would be adopted.
OpenSUSE and Fedora want to offer both, but there are maintenance concerns since they would need to maintain essentially two sets of packages.

It really is a kind of wait and see thing, anytime a distro tries to discuss it it just ends up in chaos so.

[g0ated]

Just use linux mint

[g0ated]

On 6/18/2025 at 8:10 PM, Haswellx86 said:

Wtf? They both have nothing in common. Just follow this guide and it's easy. It's actually fun as well.

Why are you even recommending arch Linux to someone who has very basic needs and does not require a rolling release distro? (their hardware is pretty old and it won't benefit from it). idk why people just recommend arch to others for no reasons.