Are there any "easy" Linux distros for low specs?

Post Reply New Topic

From my experience, I've noticed that the more user-friendly Linux distros like Zorin, Mint, and Ubuntu tend to have much higher system requirements than more minimalistic distros like Crunchbang. Is there a distro out there that balances the two aspects, and runs well on something like a Pentium 4, Pentium M, or Athlon 64 x2?

Puppy Linux immediately springs to mind, except its software selection is extremely limited, it's hard to customize, it's not really made to be "installed" in the same manner as a "normal" distro with actual partitions, and I don't know if it even supports accelerated graphics. As well, it pretty much always runs as root, which can open up plenty of security issues. It's a nice, lightweight OS for surfing the web, but it doesn't seem that great for anything else.

Crunchbang, in comparison is slightly heavier and less user-friendly, but it seems to be much more flexible, and it has access to the vast array of applications available for Debian. The only real problem it has is that it's not well suited for "normal" users, who want desktop icons and a start menu and an app store, and who don't want to spend time mucking around in config files and the terminal.

What is the "magic" distro I'm looking for, that I can recommend to new users?

You could take a look at Manjaro. It's based on Arch, so its' relatively light. And it comes with a variety of desktop environment + some community editions with for instance LXDE.

LXLE - low-spec version of Lubuntu that runs just fine on a 10 year old laptop with a non-PAE CPU and 512MB RAM. It even comes with a pre-packaged with Steam and a ton of great desktop wallpapers that you can change at the click of a mouse:
http://lxle.net/

MX-14 - low-spec version of Debian that IMO runs a bit faster than LXLE
http://www.mepiscommunity.org/mx

Some sources of further information:
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?categ ... +Computers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweigh ... stribution

Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_dist ... comparison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Li ... tributions

I second Lubuntu, also Xubuntu is a easy to use lightweight version Ubuntu that uses XFCE for it's window manager.

I'm not actually a big fan of Lubuntu or Xubuntu. I've tried them on an older laptop before and found that they're only slightly more lightweight than baseline Ubuntu.

Slax comes to mind, but may suffer from the same problem that Puppy Linux suffers from with limited software. I am not sure how easy it would be but you could install a base install of debian and install something like Openbox on it. Debian is pretty easy to install really, might not be super user friendly as in LiveCD easy but its not hard either. Plus it allows you to pick your desktop environment on install.

Others to consider,

Absolute Linux
Linux Lite
Semplice Linux

More here.

I used Semplice for a little while. It's a pretty good distro, though it's somewhat heavier than Crunchbang, and it has a bit more of a learning curve than other distros.

Tiny Core Linux is the smallest I am aware of @ this juncture
was 10-12MB approx.

I've played around a bit with Tiny Core and it is hella fast, but I could never figure out how to *do* anything productive with it. How would a person turn it into a usable distro with a package manager, graphic, sound, and network drivers, web browser, etc.? I'm guessing the closest thing would be Puppy.

fo sho

if they get too small they lack functionality

I'm thinking of downloading it again and playing around with it in a VM. Maybe then I can figure it out, and piece together something useful. Or I can try the Ubuntu Construction Kit for something a bit simpler to set up. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomization

Ubuntu is getting too mainstream for my taste, it is scaring me a little...i get this corporate vibe from them now....concerns me.

I like the obscure distros, but they do make Ubuntu quite tempting

It's funny, I'm looking back at this now, and I'm using Xubuntu as my main OS. It's a good operating system, but I guess I didn't really learn to appreciate it until I "unlearned" some of the things I had gotten used to with Windoze. One of the things that really helped me get a "feel" for Linux was installing Funtoo, a variant of Gentoo, which is notorious for being one of THE hardest distros for newbies to get into. I could almost swear that I've learned more about Linux from messing around with Funtoo for a month, than I have from years of using Debian-based distros on and off.

That all being said, Linux isn't necessarily the best OS for low-spec computers, primarily due to its poor support for older GPUs. On a newer system however, it beats the tar out of Windoze in most ways.

I tried out of interest installing a 'modern' distro recently, centos. This was on a 4 year old 3Ghz core2. I could not believe how sluggish it was to use. I have used slackware and gentoo on exactly the same computer for years and it runs fast without any performance issues.

It is often the case however that easy to use software is bloated, packed with additional interface layers and lazy.

I have always found slackware to be the best compromise for newbies, the default install has most common software with it and the slackbuilds work if you read the readme files.