Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Try mint with Xfce - on 64 bit machines and then go lighter.
alright and are you sure that is the best starter option? also what can i do on linux compared to windows?
- Gaming is less stable overall but it's exponentially better now thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck driving support. Like seriously, from a cointoss whether it even launches a couple years ago to 74% Gold or Platinum on the top 1000 games on Steam.
- Programming is easier (you can ask your commandline to install all you need at once instead of having to painstakingly individually install and set up requirements or addons to programming languages), but you don't have access to Visual Studio if you're working on C# or C++.
- Web browsing is identical, watching movies too. I've never had a problem using LibreOffice and OnlyOffice as a replacement for Word and PowerPoint, but I don't use many complicated features in Word or PowerPoint so your mileage may vary.
- Photoshop, Premiere, etc are a pain to get good replacements for, OBS for recording and DaVinci Resolve for editing is a really powerful pair though.
- I vouch for Mint with XFCE too. It was very fast on my laptop and some of the themes now are pretty. It barely uses any RAM. It has a Windows-style start menu and taskbar.
Just be warned that your family members will probably have (usually solvable) issues if they want to do anything beyond web browsing. It's a different operating system after all and it works differently in a lot of ways. Definitely recommend looking up some videos about Mint, XFCE, transitioning from Windows to Linux.
best option
Ubuntu is popular and new-user friendly. And xfce is generally lighter on resources. It's a good choice.
What can I do
Almost everything.
Some proprietary apps you've used from windows may not be available, but equivalent ones would be available on linux.
Stuff like browsing the web(provided that you don't open too many tabs, because you have low ram) and watching movies n all is quite good.
What all things fo you intend to do on it? I think it'll be easier to check that the things you want are there.
It has everything you may want to use - LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird ...
Some programs aren't supported for Linux but you can find replacement. For me it has 100% of tools that I need.
When you go from windows to mint - they feel similar (UI), but some things are different (installing programs, settings...)
It is just solid out of the box experience. You don't have to customise it to be usable, complete suite of programs and it is stable.
Some of really light distros for old PCs are missing lot of these things but you may need to explore those options if it doesn't run well.
I think Pop OS is a great place to start. I haven't personally used it but Linux Mint is commonly recommended to people who have only used windows before, it tries to have a similar UI experience.
Linux can do most things windows can, except it's free. The best thing about Linux is the depositories, unlike windows you rarely download apps from the Internet, instead you can download them from a repository. In Pop OS it's called Pop shop, it's different depending on which OS you are using.
There's very little windows can do, which linux can't also. The difference will be in how, and how easily.
Often the answer is just "install the same program, and just use it like normal". Other times, you have to go out of your way to get something running using wine.
For this, bottles is a GUI manager that can make life a lot easier.
Something that uses XFCE is a really good starting point for weak hardware. And mint is a good option for someone new to linux. It is based on ubuntu, and there is plenty of info online on how do things on ubuntu.
It also has good default repos, meaning you'll be able to find and install most software you might need, without having to start fiddling with custom software repos.
Think of it as Windows 7 in terms of functionality but with a Windows Vista/XP GUI.
That said, your CPU's performance will increase noticebly on Linux.
Puppy Linux runs on a potato of any architecture and is super user friendly (grandpa certified)! Only 300 MB or so. https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
I know a lot of people recommended Mint, which I personally use on my very modern budget gaming pc, but you should really try Puppy Linux, it's meant for the exact use case you're describing.
I've used Debian on an old netbook with an Intel Atom and onyl 2GB RAM. The experience wasn't so bad but web browsing was definitely a pain. Video calling and watching YouTube (Firefox) was very sluggish and annoying to deal with. It's fine for working with documents and watching low resolution videos locally but that's about it.
I've also tried antiX but a lot of the defaults were annoying. If you (or your family members) can deal with it, then it's probably the best lightweight Linux distro out there.
are there any linux distros that might work becasue im a noob who uses windows so im very lost. any tips or suggestions or something would be great.
In this case, I recommend just leaving your family members to do their own thing. From my experience, it is very hard to manage other people's Linux issues if you don't have decent knowledge on it yourself. If they don't want to upgrade, that's their problem. Not yours.
Did you use a 64 bit version? Running at least a 32 bit browser makes using the internet viable with 2gb.
For a more "friendly flavored" distro, MX Linux is Debian-based and comes with a bunch of quality of life tools
MX Linux seconded. It's available in 32-bit versions, too.
I haven't used it on a machine with less than 4GB though, but it runs well on an old Dell laptop from 2009.
Anything with Xfce or MATE, such as Mint Xfce or MATE
I'd like to do something similar on my Pentium 3 box. Maybe Debian with a really light WM would be a good fit, maybe IceWM? It only has 512MB of RAM though so I might have to go even lighter than Debian. I also have an Athlon XP box with 2GB of RAM, but that's too new to be fun. :p
Puppy Linux runs on a potato of any architecture and is super user friendly (grandpa certified)! Only 300 MB or so for the OS and very little RAM use. https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
There are some distros out there intended for low power machines, but usually you'll be fine installing whatever distro you want and using a lightweight desktop environment for it. Any distro running a DE like Xfce or LxQt should feel pretty decent on older hardware.
Lubuntu!
I put Lubuntu on a Chromebook with only 16 GB storage. It's a great OS for shit systems.
Back when netbooks were all the rage I threw that distro into everything haha
My favorite very light is peppermintOS, I think you may have to go back to version 10 for 32 bit though.
I'd suggest Linux mint Debian edition, at least for the 32bit machine. Many distros have stopped supporting 32bit lately.
It should be fairly user friendly.
Puppy Linux is made for old machines and generally just works. You can boot it up on a live USB and see what you think. Lots of flavours to choose from.
Considering that you're planning to use this with family members who aren't tech savvy, and as you're essentially new to Linux yourself, I would suggest something like Zorin OS. The familiarity and ease of use should help you get started fairly quickly, even for newbies. There are a lot of other great distros, of course, some of which were mentioned here, but the learning curve for those can be just a bit steeper. As someone who's essentially the "tech guy" of the family, believe me when I say you don't want them to keep bugging you about questions or tech help because they "don't understand" Linux. You want something that you just install and leave be.
Speaking of something that you can just install and leave, this isn't strictly Linux, but a great OS to use for non-tech savvy family members is Chrome OS. Get Chrome OS Flex, install it on an old laptop, give it to your family members and call it a day. I've had success with it for some of my family members who've wanted to revive old laptops. It's a lot more limited than full featured desktop operating systems, of course, but it's perfectly suitable for the basic stuff. Best of all, it's so easy to use that you usually wouldn't even have to play tech support for your family for it.
Void's xfce desktop release is awesome for old hardware but it takes a bit to setup.
since you're a noob, idk if this will be very helpful to you, but
i used debian with awesomewm on an old pentium 4 from 2004-2005 and it was pretty fast! like a modern low-end computer. but you'd have to configure it to be noob-friendly/have patient users. i don't mind it cuz i enjoy tinkering, but i imagine it could be very frustrating for other people.
i'd give you my awesomewm config (i configured it to be super minimal, but also familiar, as i was trying to create a desktop environment that could be used on older machines), but unfortunately my desktop no longer has a power supply, so i can't access it :')
For the 32-bit machine, Debian 12 with XFCE or LXQt. There's lighter desktops but those get outside of noob territory.
I did this with an old server at work recently, it's an old 2GB DDR2 single-core 32-bit VIA CPU. It's maxes out at 2GB because it only has a single RAM slot, but despite this it's ok with Debian 12. You get to have modern software on "e-waste".
For the others, try to bump them up to at least 4GB of RAM, 8 preferably, and throw Linux Mint on them. Either the XFCE edition or the flagship Cinnamon desktop, it's very performance even on older hardware I've found.
And if you really want to make them feel faster. Ditch those hard drives and get some cheap SATA SSD's. It makes all the difference in the world.
EDIT: spelling mistakes
I've said my peace about distro and desktop environment in another comment, but to answer the piece about what you can do as compared to Windows, Linux can do the vast majority of all your daily tasks. There are a couple of big sticking points, generally.
Microsoft products, i.e. Microsoft Office. There are alternatives available in the Linux space that do a great job and are good enough for probably 95-98% of people, but there are cases where they don't quuiiiite match up. Formatting PowerPoints, for example. You may save a *.pptx from LibreOffice and a colleague will open it in Microsoft PowerPoint and it doesn't look the same at all.
The other major software suite that keeps people in Windows is Adobe. Photoshop? Lightroom? Premiere? Not available on Linux. Again, there are alternatives, but they're never quite as good. I say this as a photographer that runs 100% Linux all the time, I miss my photo editing software! I used Capture One, but the same principle applies. There's no Linux release, and you can't get it running on Linux no matter how much you tinker.
The third biggest sticking point is gaming. You can game on Linux. It's better now than ever. I run AAA brand new releases on my PC, and again I'm 100% Linux. BUT! It does frequently require a little more elbow grease to get working than people are used to, and often times you can never get it to work 100% as well as it would in Windows.
Sorry for the big wall of text. But finally I just want to say, none of this is to dissuade you from putting Linux on those machine. Quite the contrary! I want you to be aware of what the pitfalls may be, so you can look out for them. I'd hate for you to go in expecting everything to be 1:1 with Windows, only for something to not work and it feel like a bad experience in the end.
I vote Ubuntu, I started as a complete noob about 10 years ago with them and at first it was frustrating and tough, but now everything is just done for me, software updates, sure! I all the sudden want to want a windows-type application, sure! I love that it comes with Firefox, which from what I've read should make your family safer from the initial launch of the browser, no matter where the site they want to reach.
I'd suggest Debian with LXDE, which, from my personal experience, works pretty fine on low-end computers. You can replace LXDE with your choice of Windows Managers for an even lighter system, but that might be a little hard if you've never used Linux before.
Browser choice is probably going to make just as much difference as distro choice. Modern browsers kinda need at least 1 GB to be usable, ideally more. Depends what you do with it of course.
Try Pale Moon, Falkon and Konqueror.
AntiX is quite good on older hardware but beware of the fact they don't use systemd. Nice effort to try and use newer init services but a lot of things really depend on systemd being installed.
WattOS (which uses systemd) is also very performant on old rigs but it needs more tweaking OOTB I'd say.
Almost everything except Ubuntu and SuSe.
It would be worth considering Antix which is very lightweight, recommending only 256 mb ram. As it's based on Debian, it also has a 32 bit edition.
I have experience with low end devices, since I'm a broke Brazilian (currently using a device with 2gb ram as my daily driver), and these are my suggestions:
You face 2 problems, low end hardware and low tech users, so going deep into very lightweight distros will affect usability. I find mxlinux to be a good middle ground of optimized for low end hardware and easy to use. This step is important, because you don't want people calling you all the time for help
Now, I suggest running the 32bit of mxlinux on all computers with less than 4gb of ram, because it makes a LOT of difference, from a machine unable to browse the internet, to a machine that works nicely. Even if you use the 64 bit version, enabling multi arch and running at least the 32bit browser makes a huge difference.
And another important thing is to use the same distro and gui on all devices, because it helps them and allows them to help each other, instead of calling you all the time. Helps with maintenance too.
For the 64 bit, Fedora LxQt works very nicely on a 2GB Ram PC. I'd suggest you avoid Lubuntu as the snaps are not very lightweight as you begin installing more and more. Debian LxQt would work as well, but it wouldn't provide any advantages over Fedora and its packages would be less up to date.
For the 32-bit one, use Debian i686.
Another option, of course, is to pick Arch and Arch32 and build a functional system from there, but there are little guarantees that the 32-bit one will work, given patches have to be done to software in order for it to compile to i686 PCs.
those are very low specs for every day distros (meaning usable for the general public), you might get away with linux mint xfce, if it ends up usable on those machine and not lag too much then don't bother with anything else, otherwise you might have to install lighter stuff like antix or lxle. If none of the above are usable you can always install puppy linux, it can run on a toaster but is not very pleasant to use. note that regardless of distro, surfing the web is going to be a chore due to half of the modern internet being heavy as fuck and hard to run, you might want to look for alternative frontend to websites like piped for youtube, urlebird for tiktok etc.
I would suggest Debian 12 XFCE or Debian 12 LXQT. Debian releases are supported for 5 years, but it gets a new release every 2 years. You might have to help your family members do the upgrade every 2 years which might be problematic.
Another option would be either of those DEs (LXQT or XFCE) but on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is rolling but its packages are tested before being released which makes it safer than arch for a noob. It also has automatic snapshots which can be easily restored if anything goes wrong. And since it's rolling, you can configure automatic updates and never have to help your family members upgrade every 2 years (like on Debian or any LTS Distro).
Codecs can easily be installed using "opi codecs", so you won't have to fool around for that too.
I've been running Tumbleweed for a bit now, and I can say it's just like Windows for the ease of use, especially if you install a packagekit frontend like Gnome Software so that your family members can easily install new programs from repos or flatpak.
Whatever you do, don't use Ubuntu or its official variants. It's too bloated due to snap and other things they do by default.
Alpine Linux is one to look at.
MX Linux works good on old hardware.
If you're looking for a DE, XFCE might even feel sluggish on older hardware. You can go lighter with LXQt or use the Pixel Desktop that Raspberry Pi OS has (which is modified LXDE).