An old laptop needing new life

[Lukep123]

Hey,

Getting straight to it, I have an old laptop, it does the job and it's not too old but I've noticed a decrease in performance lately.

The laptop was passed down to me.
It currently only has an Intel Celeron 1007U 1.50GHz, 6GB ram, no graphic card so it's a pretty basic laptop. Though, the design is pretty nice, as most Asus laptops are, the size & weight also excellent for me.

I wanted to replace my windows 10 and go for a Linux OS which would hopefully speed up my day to day operations.

I only use the laptop for some browsing, word documents, Eclipse (java) and some applications such as Skype.

Which Linux OS would be best for me, as lightweight as possible to prolong the laptop but still be okay for my work?

If I was to dualboot linux & windows, would I be looking at a slower PC or would I be much better off simply replacing windows 10 with Linux?

[Mark77]

I run the latest Ubuntu on lesser hardware and its still fine.  Make sure it has a SSD if it doesn't already.

[paddy-stone]

17 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

I run the latest Ubuntu on lesser hardware and its still fine.  Make sure it has a SSD if it doesn't already.

Agree, ubuntu would be a great way to lighten the load... but an SSD will make it shine, just make sure the height of the SSD will fit in the laptop before buying, and just get a cheap one if possible.

[Kiyuubi]

Don't use straight Ubuntu, use a lighter version like Xubuntu or Lubuntu (for an even lighter one).

[KuJoe]

If you want to get the most performance out of it, I would grab a copy of CloudReady's ChromiumOS. I installed it on an old netbook with a much slower CPU and less RAM than that laptop and it can do things now that it can't do on Windows or Linux (like streaming content at 720p without buffering or frame drops and 1080p with some slight buffering and unnoticeable frame drops).

[SCHISCHKA]

My recommendation is go with the Long Term Support version of Ubuntu; currently this is ubuntu 16.04.

Ubuntu is created from Debian & the main differences are Debian ships with Gnome3 vs Ubuntu ships with Unity;

Debian has a release cycle every 2-3 years vs Ubuntu ships every 6months or every 2 years LTS;

Typically you get newer kernel & hardware support with ubuntu but debian tends to be more reliable/stable.

Honorable mention needs to go to Fedora which is made by Redhat; has Gnome 3 & i think has a 6month release cycle.

5 hours ago, Kiyuubi said:

Don't use straight Ubuntu, use a lighter version like Xubuntu or Lubuntu (for an even lighter one).

Of course if Unity or Gnome3 is too slow for you there are alternative lightweight desktop managers. You can install the same desktop managers provided by the ones mentioned above (XFCE & LXDE) onto your existing install. Mate is quite popular for those after a lightweight interface, its based off Gnome2 and looks similar to MacOSX interface. you do not need to download all the various flavours. just pick one of ubuntu, fedora, or debian and you can choose your desktop interface after install. See my comment below:

 

11 hours ago, Mark77 said:

I run the latest Ubuntu on lesser hardware and its still fine.  Make sure it has a SSD if it doesn't already.

gnome 3 & unity run like a pig if it is not installed on a SSD

[/dev/God/Haruhi]

I'm going to do out of the box suggestions here. First you can indeed have Windows and Linux side by side without performance penalty asides the obvious one of having less space per OS. Performance decrease comes from the fact that, as people pointed out, you either use or don't use a SSD. Do note that lately Microsoft has been a plain douche with some Win10 updates overwriting Linux bootloaders for no reason at all in some computers. Happens really rarely and you can fix when that happens in less than 15 minutes, but that is some of the things you get with new MS policies. With that out of the way I would recommend to pick a distro with your desktop environment of choice, more than picking straight Ubuntu and then installing your preferred desktop on top, for plain polish.

 

As for picking your desktop environment I'd stay away from Unity and GNOME unless you are really, really sold on that desktop experience, which discards Ubuntu and quite a lot of other distros. They tend to be on the heavier side which discards them. I would look at LXDE -> XFCE -> Mate -> KDE Plasma in that order, based on "lightweightness" but being completely honest pick based on the desktop you like the most. There are differences in load but not complete game changers to make you go out of your way for being light. To give an idea, a hand me down Dell Precision M65 (2007-2008), Intel T700, 1Ghz boost to 2Ghz, 2Gb RAM, Quadro FX350M (akin to Geforce Go 7300) and the stock 120gb spinner hard drive with Arch and Plasma, around 500Mb of RAM idle, and use it with a load of 5-6 tabs confortably and a 720p video.

 

As for distros for each desktop:

• LXDE: LXLE -> http://lxle.net Based on Ubuntu/Lubuntu LTS, but doing extra polish on top, adding tweaks and polish while maintaining the low resource tag.
• XFCE: Xubuntu -> http://xubuntu.org Based on Ubuntu, using XFCE, nicely polished while you still retain the benefits of using something from a *buntu family.
• Mate: Unfortunately for this I don't have a suggestion, most of what I've used Mate was by using it on my Arch linux install, not by trying it from distros on virtual machines. However both Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora and Manjato have Mate spins that should be good for use.
• KDE Plasme: KDE Neon -> https://neon.kde.org More or less the same deal with LXLE, based on Ubuntu, but with Plasma being updated directly from KDE. 

The distros listed above are suggestions that may or may not be fit for you. I am an Arch user for example, and I would not like any of those options for my personal use. But for daily use of an average person that is another matter. Before setting into any of them, try them from a Live USB. And if you go with Linux you should be able to prolong the laptop life for quite some time.