Yeah, but 32 bit systems might not be worth reving anyway. Even software is increasingly only supporting 64 bit.

Most applications still work, or they wouldn't be in the repository. The strange one was chromium browser. It installed just fine, but wouldn't work because the system has only SSE2.

@@MichaelNROH 32bit CPUs like Intel Core Duo are still quite usable for light web browsing etc. They are a lot more powerful than the Atom N450 in the video

Actually, pentium 4 has x64 versions

@@0xC4aE1e5 It does but they are mostly for LGA775. 64-bit CPUs for the older PGA478 socket are rare and don't work on all boards

Me: *Has an HP Omen 15 laptop with a Nvidia GPU, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage* Also me: Look at who has a new Jellyfin Media Server and Backup storage on Fedora Server

@@kuroenekodemon your evil XD

IMHO its better to not test them in VM's but on your hardware using Live CD

That's also a solid choice. I do it usually as the second step. First check it in a VM to see wether or not it feels right, then on bare metal to see potential issues and then install it. Also you can install it alongside your previous OS to keep one foot in the door in case something important does not work or performers badly. That's how I roll for my one and only computer. But then of course you have to clean up grub afterwards. There are a thousand options. And I get it why this is sometimes perceived as bad by new users.

​@@wombatdkjust livecd idk basic features like touchpad w/ gestures, brightness control, network etc work pretty well, the problems start to occur when you want to go deeper (mainly power control, honestly) or if you're using wm without a de (but then you're probably techsavvy enough to configure it yourself)

Mm... Linux lite is solid, but Zorin I feel it perfect for new users and HW usage.

@@ShadowPriestBear pick your flavor. I also recommend ventoy. You install it on a stick, you put bare iso's on it and you can choose the iso to load during boot. Very convenient. All iso's on on single stick ready to boot windows, a rescue os, debían, arch manjaro and much more.

Don't try it if you are planning to use another monitor

I use an Atom N270 netbook as a pi-hole server running on linux, upgraded to 2GB RAM. No noise, low power, and the machine is not going to waste!

there's a "lite" version too 17.1...works beautifully

This is very true. I tried two different distros on an old HP laptop. And although it started getting more and more crappy under windows, none of the distros I have tried (Mint and Pop_OS) improved it and even introduced new problems... Now I'm trying to turn it into a home server with Fedora Server, as it has a large HDD.

@@kondrik3777 Pop_OS by default uses gnome-based graphical shell that can hardly be called lightweight. Mint has a version with xfce, which works a little better (but you may have tried cinnamon, which is somewhere in between). I've had good results with debian+xfce, but it's highly hardware dependent. In the sense that if you only have a basic driver working without any acceleration, it can really work badly. I also had glitches and what looks like a memory leak with lxde on some computers.

@@kote315 precisely. Mint Cinnamon was the first distro I wanted to switch from W10 to. And yes, I discovered that there are more lightweight distros, when I later dug deeper into the Linux rabbit hole 😆 I'll see how my home server project turns out, and then maybe I'll try the xfce version of Mint.

I can confirm this.. My media streaming pc suffers with playback stream i am not sure what it is but it does, like i get uStutters of notorious 1fps or something.. That or screen tearing.. Lots of it. Issues that on windows don't happen, still i use linux there for convenience, being faster and for the use case it rather much more be linux.

Which are both good choices as well

@@MichaelNROH It could just be personal Bias; But Zorin Lite just seems to Bog down more resources. I try to bring back some oooold machines that probably have to true purpose at this point lol

Linux mint cinnamon 64bit still feels faster and snappier and takes less ram. Tested on my acer aspire one 725 netbook with 2GB ram with a slow hard drive. (Ony window 8.1 feels as fast) Zorin was slower. I would recommend it on a core i3 or better witth 4gb ram

I originally wrote down that ZorinOS came with Wine installed, which is actually not the case, so I cut out the Wine parts entirely. Kind of overlooked the fact that it was only a prompt when writing down my notes.

then what do you recommend for me?

Hey I have an ACER Aspire One ZG5 model too, what did you end up using on it ? Can we get it to at least run youtube ?

Arch is alright but it can't beat a purposely scaled-down Linux distro for such old hardware like AntiX in terms of performance. For the sort of hardware shown in the video, to try to use anything other than AntiX, Puppy, Linux Lite, Slax, etc. is nothing short of masochism.

@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 well antix is just debian and icewm, so you can basically install arch and icewm ontop and have a more performance and a super lightweight system that nothing can beat! But ya ofc Antix is much more user friendly than what i just said

hi mate, i am a beginner in this matter. I have an old laptop Asus TP200s and i want to know which linux distro is compatible with this laptop. My old laptop only have 2gb ram. Please advise. thank you.

@@jrkinabalu99 Mint Cinnamon is the easiest I have found to use, and the most versatile in that it installs on pretty much anything, old or new. For older computers, I hear a lot about Centos. Linux in general is lightweight, so it probably won't which distro you choose, as long as it installs. Bear in mind, my experience is only with Mint Cinnamon, Ubuntu 20.1, Pop!os, Elementary, and lately, Zorin Lite, and I can only speak with confidence for what I've tried. I still believe Linux Mint Cinnamon is the best out of everything I've used. It's been my daily driver, more or less, for three years. I love it, and it runs quite well on my old HP Elitebook 8560p (for some reason Ubuntu failed to install properly on it, but would probably run OK if it installed). I have Zorin Lite on it now, and it seems smooth, too, though I still prefer Cinnamon because the native software centre for Zorin seems buggy, at least for now. I would push yuou to Mint Cinnamon, or Mint Mate, if your computer is too old for Cinnamon to run well.

Thank u for leaving this comment. With this I found that I can try Mint Cinnamon if Zorin Lite doesn't work on my old Thinkpad. Thanks!

@@zerocal76 I have found Zorin is better if you want to play old windows games because of the preinstalled graphics. That's just something you might want to keep in mind.

Thank you 😃

Agreed. I installed ZorinOS on my daughters all-in-one HP. The performance was fine, but the look and feel of the DE just did not compare well with LM running the Cinnamon DE.

That's fine. My personal choices would also be different, but it is easy.

@@MichaelNROH Completely agree with the ease of installation. At the time my daughter did not have any experience using a PC, be it Windows or Linux. I had just heard about ZorinOS and figured I'd give it a shot. Install and initial configuration was a breeze. As for resource usage, it was great. But after a while I started to notice that some of the DE customization options found in Cinnamon were missing. It was a bunch of little things that I missed that started to annoy me.

Oh, that will happen for sure. Even if the distros were still to support it, what good would it be if no applications do? 64 Bit with all of it's advantages only causes the developers to put in more effort to make a 32 Bit version as well (or built it first and add bit address support later)

Is it a 32 bit system?

@@MichaelNROH it’s 64 bit

With 4Gb you can probably already go for the Core version, but you just need to test it

If this is a video subsystem problem, you can try using Linux without a GUI. It's also possible that it's a RAM issue (especially if you have a graphics "card" integrated into the processor), in which case you can test and replace it (unless it's soldered to the board, of course). If the processor is defective, the repair will be unprofitable.

⁠​⁠@@kote315Yeah, the processor has Intel graphics inside. I opened it up before, reseated the RAM, and the issues are still there.

Getting an SSD is the first step to upgrading a "slow" laptop, regardless of the operating system. It is also especially important for low RAM machines, since when it is full, some stuff gets offloaded to the main drive. The faster it is, the more responsive the system

My Linux system boots to 210MB RAM (out of 32GB), it use free memory to cache disk. Linux felt much leaner than Windows XP, it was obvious by how much Windows swap on the same task.

Startup?

On the other hand, due to the unreasonably high system requirements of Windows 11, many people are trying to find an alternative. There are a lot of people who think "Why the hell should I buy a new compatible computer? The performance of a 10-year-old PC is enough for me. After the upgrade, I will not get anything revolutionary new, only the ability to run newer programs and alll these security-patch-things. Why pay more?"

​@@kote315 thats an entirely different discussion. Those are working, high-spec machines. They run windows fine, you don't need more PERFORMANCE, you need security updates and support.

​@D Reaper jesus christ always back to fucking E-waste with you people. Frankly, no, computers with sub 2ghz processors just ARE ewaste at this point. Installing linux on them doesn't fix that, they're just old hardware. They can't run anything most people want to run on them, and frankly finding and distributing such systems to people who COULD get use out of them, would almost certainly end up hurting the planet more as you have to ship several pounds of mass across the world for a solution that's worse than a proxmox VM. Notice, people were willing to sell their old machines for cheap to your boss, precisely BECAUSE they had no use for them. Also, as I mentioned in the other reply, you haven't actually said those machines were in need of more performance to begin with. You need to factory wipe machines before reselling them anyway, frankly it seems far more likely linux was just a way to do that quickly and easily without having to deal with potential windows licensing complications. Not to mention linux installs faster and is generally a better experience. Nothing you've said has anything to do with eeking out more performance of the old systems, and frankly based on your noticably indirect phrasing, I'm guessing you have no evidence to suggest that's why it was done either, meaning you know your story is irrelevant. My point is about marketing linux to average users as revitalizing their old systems. Systems which they have no use for to begin with, otherwise they'd still be using them, and systems which - irrelevant of the OS - are too out of date to be comfortably used since software, websites, etc. have all also gotten more computationally intensive. Linux is a couple % faster than windows sure, but realistically a couple of % won't take a system from unusable to usable, it'll just make the unbearable mildly more bearable. Unless we're talking about a system with 2-4gb of ram (which, again, already won't be capable enough for comfortable day to day use on linux or not) the 1-2gb of ram saved by linux is unlikely to significantly change the performance of a system to the point of getting new use out of it as an average user. It's like an ant, sure, on weak machines linux can lift a lot more than it's own bodyweight, but it still isn't lifting much. Linux may reduce the RAM usage by 40% compared to windows, but the OS isn't what's using the most RAM to begin with. It's an improvement sure, but it's not going to be what takes a system so old you stopped using it and make it perform well enough that the average user will start using it again. Ants lifting so much more than their own body weight is impressive sure, but realistically, they still aren't lifting that much. Just the same, linux saving 40% of the memory compared to windows is impressive sure, but it's still only saving a gigabyte or two. These machine still might have some use, but an average user won't have a use for them. (and again, shipping them around to try to find someone who does is almost certainly going to hurt the planet far more)

@@robonator2945 But if you do install Windows 11 (it's not that hard to get around the artificial limits), you'll find that you now do need more performance, as your computer is no longer busy with the work tasks that you need, but constantly searching for updates, collecting telemetry, showing ads and doing Bill Gates knows what else. So you will be forced to install a more powerful processor, memory and SSD, despite the fact that everything worked quite well in Windows 7. Or you can install Linux and use this computer for a few more years.

​@@kote315 yeah that's just flat out wrong. I DID upgrade to windows 11, and the experience isn't significantly different to windows 10. The simple reality is, the spyware has been in windows for ages already, and most of that doesn't actually impact performance. It CAN impact responsiveness slightly, but windows has been highly optimized so that it doesn't pose a performance issue. If it truly were as simple as "install linux and get 20% more performance" then everyone already would have. Linux's peformance benefits are present, but they're nowhere near as clear cut or large enough to matter for most average user usecases. The times when linux DOES notably perform better, it's almost always a result of implementation rather than general optimization. For instance factorio IIRC was able to asyncrhonously save on it's linux version, but couldn't on it's windows version. That meant on the windows version you would get a hitch everytime it saved, and on the linux version you wouldn't. While linux does perform differently in that case, it's not because windows has more spyware that slowed it down, it's because a specific feature was present on one OS and not the other. If we're factoring that as "performance" though then we also have to give Windows credit for all the shit it can do that linux can't, notably HDR. There IS a performance difference, but for the VAST majority of usecases it's a "oh that's kind of nice it's a tad faster" situation; it won't make an unusable computer suddenly super nice to use. And, again, if it's an old computer you don't use anyway, then being slightly less shit than it currently is won't mean you have a use for it. You already made due without it, and it's still bad, it's just less bad than it was. Is your average user going to go out of their way to find a new use for a computer that's still a slow piece of shit, just because it's a slightly less slow piece of shit than it was before? A techie might have a use for shitty computers sure, but a techie already knows about linux; they don't have to be convinced to use it. Will the AVERAGE user get anything out of a slightly less piece of shit computer?

Debian 11 XFCE? What about AntiX Linux?

I mean from the overall experience, I wouldn't go all in for the most lightweigt distro's. In regards to Zorin OS, the better choice there would be the Core edition.

Probably

@@MichaelNROH not lite version the core version

@@akshithj7857 Still probably. It's within the minimal specs as long as it's a 64 Bit gpu. The performance will not be good, but any modern application will run into memory bottlenecks nowadays

The current 32-Bit variant of ZorinOS will drop support on the 31st of May, and I don't think there will be a successor. 32 Bit systems which actually have a 32 Bit architecture are fading out of existence since with the hardware standard being so high, many applications drop support as well.