Which Ubuntu version is best for old Laptop with 512 MB RAM

[Nitin_Dawar]

Dear All,

Can you please suggest me, which is the best & suitable Ubuntu for my old Laptop with 512MB RAM & 60 GB HDD.

Also if there is any other Linux OS, kindly suggest.

Thanks in Advance

Nitin

[sudodus]

Without knowing more about the computer I'd say Lubuntu 14.04 LTS or a flavour or re-spin based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Bento, Bodhi or LXLE.

See this link for for details Old hardware brought back to life

If you give us information about the CPU and graphics chip, we can give more specific advice.

[trag]

Look for distro designed to run netbooks, Elementary OS, Zorin OS Lite, and others are perfect for older or low powered machines.
Good luck
trag

[EmpireITtech]

Lubuntu or Xubuntu would be your best Ubuntu distros...however, you might wanna look into a more lightweight distro such as Puppy, Peppermint, or any of the other ones listed above =]

[stinger30au]

i use Lubuntu 14.04 on my Pentium 4 HT 3.4Ghz pc with 2 gigabyte of ram and 160 gig HDD and Nvidia AGP 5500 256Mb Video card. Very quick for old pc. keep me happy for many years yet

[LastDino]

Bodhi, Papermint, Lubuntu (Probably the best out of the lot), you can try some Open box versions of other distro too but if you're new to Linux try to avoid them.

[El Tito]

Lubuntu(I suppose easier) or Puppy Linux (other linux OS). I currently have debian+xfce in my old laptop running fast and smooth.

[Rob Sayer]

32 bit Xubuntu took about 250MB on my netbook when installed. Lubuntu takes much less ... about 100Mb or so.

Apps can take a lot of memory nowadays too. I'm running firefox now with just one tab open and a few plugins, and it's using about 210Mb. So I'd say definitely lubuntu 14.04 for a laptop with a half gig.

That's for ubuntu. As mentioned, there are lighter alternatives. Ubuntu is extremely full featured but it's not a lightweight distro. Debian is quite a bit lighter and ones like puppy even more so.

Debian and other real lightweights don't do as much of the config work for you as ubuntu, which is largely why ubuntu isn't that light. But for newbies it's hard for me not to recommend ubuntu. The support here and at askubuntu is way better than anything else. And the hardware recognition is right up there too.

I guess some real lightweight distros are easier than others for beginners but that's not something I can answer. But I'd still recommend lubuntu if you're a linux novice.

[pfeiffep]

I had quite a time with Ubuntu on my 512MB Dell - I maxed out memory to 2GB for about $30

[kurt18947]

Another lesser known candidate - Vector linux XFCE. I have it running on an HP desktop that shipped with WindowsME(!) Celeron 633Mhz. 64 MB. RAM. I bumped the RAM to 512 MB. it uses just over 100 MB. running Firefox. The processor won't support current Flash but it works pretty well for web browsing and basic desktop tasks.