Do you have a old PC or Laptop? You are not willing to give away and looking for ways to revive it? Are you searching for a operating system that can run on this? Here is the list of free operating systems that is lightweight and uses less resources. All these operating systems can be either be booted from USB/pen drive or from CD. These are pocket friendly operating systems.
Puppy Linux is very lightweight and comes with basic applications required for daily usage. This can be loaded from USB drive or CD and loads into RAM. So no need of installation. This runs fast even on old computers. This consumes ~100 MB of space and the download size of the ISO file is ~201 MB. Installation comes with Abiword word processing, Gnumeric spreadsheet, Pale Moon as a default browser. You can download and install open source Libre Office (free alternative to MS Office), Firefox and Adobe flash.
Slax is another lightweight OS which comes with basic application. This can be run from USB or CD. Installation comes with basic application like Firefox, but office application is missing. This come with 32-bit and 64-bit versions. As per the documentation, this can run in old computers with RAM as low as 256 MB for GUI.
Lubuntu is yet another fast and light weight operating system based on Ubuntu and LXDE desktop. This is one of the popular choice among people using old computers. This comes with popular basic applications. Since this is based on Ubuntu, applications can be downloaded and installed from Ubuntu repository. You can choose to install 32-bit or 64-bit version.
LXDE is a light weight desktop designed to be fast and slim. This uses low resource. Hence suitable for old computers. This comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit version. Compare to Lubuntu, download size of this is larger as it contains more applications. More applications can be dowloaded and installed from Fedora repository.
We have installed all the 4 Linux variants on our old computer and laptop. They use very low resource and runs fast.
Great idea. I have a couple of these old laptops lying with me.
May be I should try these out.
Do try these and let us know your comments.
Great information Sri & Kri! I shall try them out with my old laptop… thanks so much… 🙂