OS Options - Windows Alternatives
 

We have an old PC that my son want's to setup in his room.

It's a HP Pavilion with Pentium E5300 (W) (2.6GHz /800 MHz) 2 MB L2 cache; Dual Core (65W) processor and it's maxed out with 4GB of RAM.

Any suggestions on an alternative OS to Windows that I can load instead to make better use of it's limited resources?

I've looked into Chrome OS but he wouldn't have access to the Google Play store for apps so I'm not sure how much of an upside that would be other than the fact that he's already very comfortable in that OS from his usage in school and a Chromebook at home.

I've also looked in the various Linux OS' but there's so many, I'm not sure which would be most appropriate.

In the short term, I don't see him using it for much more than school work and web access.

Thoughts?

Also, I need to add WiFi to the PC. Looking at adding a PCIe adapter but I'm having a tough time finding one that explicitely states it will work in Windows 7 and Linux. Any cause for concern?

I run Ubuntu on Celerons with 2 GB of ram and they perform as well as modern Windows PCs. Ubuntu on that setup would scream.

Thanks. That seems to be the most popular, likely for good reason. So I load Ubuntu on a thumb drive and boot it up on the old machine and it overwrites Windows, correct?

Any reason to expect difficulties with peripheral? Bluetooth mouse? WiFi printers, etc?


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I've had good luck with old PC's with both Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I prefer Mint.

It really is just as easy as put it on a thumbdrive, put it in the PC, and turn it on. Drop in a clean cheap SSD if you want to wake up the machine a bit - it runs pretty quick.

You can just boot it from the thumb drive into Ubuntu to try it out. You can choose to install it later.

Any guidance on what a worthwhile SSD would be? Amazon has them under $20. Not sure if that qualifies as cheap or garbage.


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Linux Mint - https://www.linuxmint.com

I've been using it on a tired Dell laptop for more than a year.

The only problem I've had is getting the audio to work properly through a pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones.
But I've been using wired headphones plus an external amp/dac (Oppo) with excellent results.

Second on Ubuntu

I usually put Linux on my old PC's and it works fine, but then I hate Windows anyway. I do like Mac's but it's a closed system so Linux is next best.

+1 for Linux Mint. I've been using it for ~6 months now and will likely switch to it exclusively soon. Much faster to boot than Win10 and more responsive as well. I am currently using a dual boot setup with Win10 "just in case" but have found little that I can't do without Windows.

As has probably already been said, you can use a program like Balena Etcher or Rufus to burn the LM image (or other Linux distro of choice) to a flash drive and boot from that to test out Linux before ever writing it to a hard drive. If you don't like it, wipe the flash drive and move on.

OS Options - Windows Alternatives
 

Are any of these more or less appropriate for a 12 year old? He’s asked about gaming but I’ve told him not to expect much out of this machine.

I see him doing HW and watching YouTube for the next year, we’ll reassess needs then.

Also any insight on how to make the machine reliably connect to WiFi, especially in a Linux setup would be appreciated if it’s out there.


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OS Options - Windows Alternatives
 

After doing some more reading, I loaded Chrome OS on the PC because it doesn’t appear as though the Google products (primarily Classroom and Drive) don’t play well in a Linux environment.


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out of curiosity, what is the Linux distro that can run on the oldest machine with the least RAM?

I’m thinking like a reaaaaaly old micro laptop. Toshiba “Libretto”. I think it has 16 MB of RAM? I’d swap in an SSD too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto Was digging through a box and found it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-weight_Linux_distribution

Looks like DSL might fit the bill: DSL information

I run macs. I also use Linux at work
I’m fairly computer literate.

I used to have a Debian 4 machine as a desktop, running Gnome as the desktop env.
The problem was I needed another machine to google how to fix stuff when it wouldn’t boot.
Ok 90% of my problem was Nvidia driver compatibility but I wouldn’t recommend a Linux machine to anyone unless they both know what they are doing and also have windows for games and to run all the stuff that doesn’t have a crappy Linux clone that does some of the stuff but doesn’t interchange with anything else (open office I’m looking at you here).

For Kids - chrome book.
I hate them, but the schools here have standardized on them so it makes things easier.

I think Linus hit the nail on the head on the topic of NVidia; I won't quote him.

Suffice it to say that almost any ATI (now AMD) graphics card works great without all the faffing around for closed, proprietary, binary-only drivers that aren't updated fast enough.

Don't under-estimate the flexibility of the young. Also, depending on age and their interest/curiosity, they can learn a darn sight more from Linux than 'Doze.

OpenOffice has been dead for 5 years. Try LibraOffice, because that's where all the devs went when Oracle effectively killed the project. But I don't use Orifice at all or care about compatibility. Never even opened the last 3 copies I bought...

You can run many simpler Windows programs under WINE just fine. Even Motec log analyzer works under it (so long as I use an old 32-bit version).

To actually run serious Windows programs - like Motec ECU Manager to tune my EFI in real-time - I use libvirt to run a full Win7 VM. Works great.

And I’ve been running macs exclusively for about 7 years. Most of my stuff runs native or inside docker/k8s so I don’t really have a desire to go back to Linux until it gets deployed or I need more than 64G of ram.

Oh yes! Thanks!

what brand of linux is good/best for a 8700k cpu on a 370z board [msi gamer pro]

to get a back up for w10