Like the title says I want to install a Linux distro on my old laptop. I am currently looking into installing a SSD, but I want to learn a distro for fun! I haven’t been able to find a good current resource aside from the Linux Masters here, so I am actually asking for help on the Internet! What distro is the best!?
EDIT: thanks so much everyone for your recommendations and advice! I installed a couple of different systems before deciding that I think the laptop may be able to support Fedora with KDE plasma (my favorite flavor of the installs so far) and I’m finding it really attractive and easy to use. You will see once I get some more disk space used how the performance holds up! If it runs into trouble I might switch the machine back over to mint with, that one seemed to run really well and was pretty familiar seeming from my Windows days, also seem more low end and booted a little faster. I think I might even end up switching to Linux on my desktop I had so much fun with it last night!! I really appreciate all the information and will probably be experimenting with a more lightweight build on this computer in the future! I’m a Linux user and it was easier than I ever thought! ❤️
Fedora for beginners. Ubuntu-bssed lost the crown because of Snap bullshit.
That is the eternal question but no distro is best. The most commonly suggested ones are Linux Mint and Pop OS. I will recommend Bazzite and say to avoid Arch or Arch-based distros.
Do you know the specs of this laptop off hand? 2007 would place it in sort of a grey area between 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. If it is 32-bit, you are likely going to have major issues and I would recommend using something else.
Even if it is a 64-bit CPU, the performance may not be amazing, and running modern browsers with anything less than, say, 4GB RAM could be an issue.
I would recommend something lightweight, such as Linux Mint with the XFCE Desktop Environment. You may need to get even more aggressive about finding something lightweight for something that old, though.
I’d say for a new user it doesn’t really matter which distro you use as long as you find an environment you’re comfortable using to get your feet wet. I would highly recommend going for KDE if you come from Windows since it has a similar appearance. Gnome for those coming from Apple. With regards to your question; if you want stability, go for Debian as a distro. Especially on an older laptop like that it will work fine. You could grab the ISO via the official site here (Click on the “Live KDE” link) : https://www.debian.org/CD/live/ If you do happen to go for KDE, use the Discover program to find new software to install. If you would like to have flatpak, or snap support this can also be installed via Discover. If I remember correctly there’s also an appimage manager you could find via Discover, which will “install” all appimages to a specific folder so you can more easily find them there. Beyond the above it should be easy enough to get wise about Linux by using it. Even without installing you can use the liveimage for a while to get a feel for it, and I would definitely suggest looking around for what suits your tastes. Experiment to your heart’s content; if you break something you can just reinstall it from a new live image.
It’s been a long time since I’ve used 2007 class laptops. In my mind I’d lean towards like Lubuntu or Xubuntu. LXQT or Xfce. It won’t look as modern as GNOME, KDE, Cosmic but they’re good
antiX would be a good choice for that machine.
