Which is the best distro for old computer

[phillip69]

I have a really really old desktop I have tried a lot of distros none of them worked

[corrytonapple]

Exactly, what distros did you try?
When did you try them?
What system did you try them on?
What happened in the end?

[wilee-nilee]

Try puppy linux, and post the stats of the computer.

[Shadius]

Try puppy linux, and post the stats of the computer.

Agreed. State your system's information so we're able to make a better suggestion.

[peter d]

I'm quite liking Slitaz on an old laptop with a small hard drive and ony 2656MB RAM. It looks good and works lightning fast. Only 32MB download too.

[yeehi]

Get some sort of GNU/Linux distro running on your old computer and launch a terminal with ctrl-t.

enter the following two commands, one by one and then paste the output onto this thread. It will provide an idea of what hardware you have.

lsusb
lspci

I would say that the best distro is one that respects your freedom. One which uses only free software. I suggest you try trisquel. It is based on Ubuntu, but is fully free. It uses the linux-libre kernel and supports only free software.

[Bluenoser81]

Most likely Puppy Linux will be the answer. If you want to stick to Ubuntu-based (puppy switched to Slackware-based, if I recall correctly), you can try Lubuntu (the lightest), and I believe there are probably some even lighter Ubuntu-based spins out there using even lighter desktop environments.

[Jerry N]

I have a really really old desktop I have tried a lot of distros none of them worked

I have tried a lot of so called "light" Linux distributions in the last 5 years on computers with 233 to 400 mhz processors and 128 to 256MB RAM and haven't found anything that works nearly as well as crusty old out of date Windows 2000. Damn Small Linux worked but it is an out of date dead distribution and is pretty weird with its own bizarre printer driver system. Have you tried Tiny Core? I think it comes from the guy(s) that originally developed DSL. The only time I tried it I thought it was rather primitive - kind of like going back to MSDOS 1.x.

Jerry

[corrytonapple]

Get some sort of GNU/Linux distro running on your old computer and launch a terminal with ctrl-t.

enter the following two commands, one by one and then paste the output onto this thread. It will provide an idea of what hardware you have.

lsusb
lspci

I would say that the best distro is one that respects your freedom. One which uses only free software. I suggest you try trisquel. It is based on Ubuntu, but is fully free. It uses the linux-libre kernel and supports only free software.

I'll just throw out there, if you don't want to get far from the Ubuntu family, Debian is always there. Very lightweight, and if you want free only like yeehi says, then Debian is it. They are free only. I had LXDE in under 100MB, probably less. I don't know because its been a while

[zombifier25]

Ubuntu Minimal is probably the lightest Ubuntu-based I have seen. You need to configure it though.