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.
A lot of it will come down to what you’re running for a desktop environment and software. I’ve got an old laptop with a duel core 2Ghz (x86_64) processor and 2G of ram, and running Debian with XFCE it can do basic web browsing, video playing/streaming up to ~720p, game emulators, etc with the same snappiness as a normal computer.
Ubuntu is a bit bulkier than Debian and some other Debian derivatives, so if you go with Ubuntu you’d probably make sure to go with a more lightweight ‘flavor’ with a non-gnome desktop and remove anything you don’t need.
Alpine and Puppy Linux are two other super lightweight distros that also might be worth checking out (albeit Alpine being a little more advanced and Puppy Linux being a bit limited).
4gb is not enough lmao
I’d say go with opensuse tumbleweed/stable if you have ram
Arch+lxde if you do not.
If you want even better options, they exist.
I’m running Gentoo on a 15-year-old laptop (HP Pavilion from 2008, Athlonx2 1.7GHz, 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD), but that’s only practical if you’re willing to let it compile things overnight. Anyway, based on my experience, you’ll get a workable machine out of it, but large programs like modern web browsers will have a certain amount of startup lag.
If your laptop has a 64-bit CPU, any standard distro will probably work. If it’s a 32-bit CPU, you’ll need a distro that still supports that, of which Debian is probably the most popular (other options would be openSUSE, Mageia, and, yes, Gentoo). If this laptop was a lower-end machine 15 years ago, you may want to consider Puppy Linux.
You’ll want a lighter or older desktop environment (MATE, TDE, XFCE, LXDE, maybe Lumina) or a plain window manager, as others have said—do not try to install current Gnome or KDE (so the main Ubuntu flavour is not a good choice).
I dropped my laptop (couple years old) and it is basically unusable. So, I’m looking to revive my really old laptop (15 year old).
For those asking specs. I think the hard drive has issues so I’m going to replace with ssd. The laptop came with windows 7 32 bit. So, because it came with windows 7 32 bit, the manufacturer says that it has max memory of 8GB. I know I putted 2X4GB sticks in it last time I used it which was 4 years ago. I’m not sure if the chipset supports 64 bit. Also, if I remember correctly, CPU was like first gen i3 with 1.8 or maybe just maybe 2.Something GHz and with like 3GHz turbo.
Thanks everyone. I might try Ubuntu, but most likely, I’ll go with Lubuntu, Xubuntu or Ubuntu with Mate. And, I will use it for some light coding and web surfing.
32bit Windows only supports 4GB without PAE enabled, so the manufacturer would/should have said 4GB max. Most 32bit distros ship with PAE enabled so it doesn’t care, however some distros like Ubuntu don’t ship 32bit anymore, but there’s some other good suggestions in the thread.
Pretty much any Linux distro is so light you should worry about browser minimum requirements instead.
Try Lubuntu! It’s the light version of Ubuntu. I ran it on a netbook from 2010. You’ll be fine.
You can put Ubuntu on a 15 year old laptop, but it will be extremely slow. Lubuntu or Xubuntu would better suit the laptop.
For anyone wondering on update on this. So I install Ubuntu. As you guys know, it is 64 bit only. I was 50/50 expecting it to fail. It installed fine. I checked the specs. Intel i3 2.2GHz 8GB and 64 bit architecture. I just couldn’t remember if it was Intel 64 bit or not. Anyway, it installed fine.
However, I did not like that I was forced to snapd. I tried to remove it, and played with Ubuntu a bit. After an hour so I came back to re-read comments on other suggested distros. In looked up install arch on YouTube. I saw that I could use archinstall so I did. Currently looking at what desktop environment I should use.
I’m not a Linux noob. I just didn’t know the Ubuntu requirements. And also, I’ve been comfortably been using Fedora in my main desktop. I just wanted something different on this old old laptop. Thank you all for the comments. And specially for the recommendation give.
I’ve been running Void on a dual core Atom with 1862mb of ram. It won’t play 1080p video but it will browse the web fine.
Ubuntu, due to the Gnome desktop, might not be the best choice here. Can you share the laptop’s specs? If it is 32 bit only, this limits your options considerably. With the few information so far, I’d suggest anything with LXDE or XFCE as a desktop environment, if you’re feeling fancy, you can even go for tiling window manager like i3 or sway. Distro itself… Debian? Arch? Depends mainly on your skillset and preference, you might have to do some modification by yourself (so bring some basic Linux skills)
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.
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.
did it have 32bit cpu by any chance?. since linux stopped supporting it a while ago. if its 64 bit its fine i think
Linux hasn’t stopped supporting 32-bit. I’m currently running Debian on an old 32-bit netbook just fine.
I shared specs on another comment. Let me share link. https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/comment/310020 I’m still learning Lemmy, so I’m not sure if it will link properly. Basically Tl;Dr: maybe 32 bit 8GB 1.8 or 2.2 GHz i3 maybe first gen. I’m currently waiting on ssd.
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!
I run it on a raspberry pi, so I’d say pretty low.
2 GHz dual-core processor or better, 4 GB system memory, 25 GB of free hard drive space (per official documentation)
The main Ubuntu flavor is pretty heavy since it uses GNOME, you are better off running Lubuntu, Xubuntu or Ubuntu Mate. For very low end hardware you could use something like antiX.
I’ve never used Ubuntu, but I used Debian for a while and the Mate desktop and highly recommend Mate.
Ive used Lubuntu on old machines in the age range OP is asking and its great. Turns a 2011 Macbook into a functional machine, had what felt like out-of-the-box performance.
That being said, the best performance gains from laptops can honestly just be a good cleaning. Cat hair and dust in machines that are hot day 1 can add up and send your CPU into “please help me” mode.
If you have more than 4GB of RAM you can install most distros. If not, I’d list my specs, especially the RAM.
Also, IMO, it’s less the distro itself. It’s more what DE (desktop environment) you choose. The DE is a set of preograms that responsible for the graphical part (like the taskbar, icons, settings).
The distro only help to save you the time/effort changing DE.
Anyways, distros:
x32: Zorin Lite 32bit (little older), Puppy Linux, Bodhi Linux, antiX, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, PeppermintOS, MX Linux.
x64: ZorinOS Lite, Ubuntu MATE, PeppermintOS, Linux Lite.
DEs: LXDE, LXQt, XFCE.
KDE is light-ish (new versions only).
I’d recommend you to stay away from Gnome.
Apparently I answered the first half only in my head…
An external site claims that those are the requirements to 22.04:
• 2 GHz dual core processor
• 4 GiB RAM
• 25 GB of hard drive space
• VGA capable of 1024×768 screen resolution
I hope you have ssd and maxed out ram. 15 years is Core2Duo right?
Try HaikuOS, KolibriOS and the third option could be Ubuntu or Kubuntu. I’m sure Gnome and Kde will run just fine, but lxqt is marketed as the ost lighweight Linux DE.
But try Haiku and Kolibri for real even they don’t run on Linux Kernel.
Yes I will give it ssd and yes it has max RAM. We’ll see how it will do. Waiting on ssd.
