Breathe life into older x86 machines with the best lightweight Linux distros
The best lightweight Linux distro can easily revive older hardware and even replace your current operating system. As a result, they have become too bloated for older machines. Without a healthy dollop of system memory and an extra core or two, these distros may not deliver the best performance. Thankfully, there are many lightweight distros, trimmed and tweaked by expert hands, which can be used to breathe new life into older hardware. The lightweight distros in this guide are fully capable of reviving older hardware and can even function as a replacement of your current operating system, if you’re willing to adjust to their way of working and install extra apps as necessary. To find out more about Linux, we’ve featured the best Linux online courses. Absolute Linux is a lightweight distro designed for desktop use, and as such comes preinstalled with the Firefox browser and LibreOffice suite. It’s based on Slackware but unlike its parent OS, aims to make configuration and maintenance as simple as possible. The installer is text-based and there’s no Live mode, but nevertheless it’s incredibly simple to follow. The way Absolute is structured also means that you can add and remove packages from the install media to create a distro which truly suits you, though you’ll need some time and experience with Linux if you really want to make the most of this feature. Once installed, Absolute Linux is incredibly nimble. This is ensured through the lightweight IceWM window manager, along with popular apps such as LibreOffice, making this OS perfect for older machines. The distro includes many useful custom scripts and utilities to ease configuration and maintenance of the installation. There’s also plenty of documentation accessible from within the desktop itself to assist new users. antiX is one of the best options that’ll be content on a computer with very little resources. The full edition of antiX, which uses IceWM together with the Rox file manager, is one of the lightest distros around and yet ships with lots of apps, including both mainstream and lightweight ones, for virtually every desktop task. The distro uses its own repos together with that of Debian’s. While it bundles the Synaptic package manager, one of the interesting aspects of the distro is the metapackage installer that helps make the distro accessible to new users. antiX boots into a pleasing looking IceWM window manager with icons on the desktop. One interesting aspect of the distro is the home-grown antiX control panel which you use to modify virtually all aspects of your installation. For example, you can modify different aspects of the desktop’s appearance such as themes, menus, wallpaper as well as configure the antiX ad blocker, image a partition and tweak the automount behavior using the custom modules in the control panel. Crunchbang (or #!) was a very popular Debian-derived distro specifically designed to use as few system resources as possible. While it was discontinued in 2013, the community fondly remembered its lightning speed and responded with two Crunchbang-based distros to continue its legacy. However, one of those successors, Crunchbang++, has now been discontinued. BunsenLabs is still active, though, and its current release (Lithium) is based on the latest stable version of Debian featuring a gorgeously configured Openbox window manager and its own repository of core packages. The distro ships with an assortment of themes and wallpapers, and includes a number of everyday desktop apps to provide a very usable out-of-the-box experience. BunsenLabs is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines, and the developers recommend running the distro on a machine with more than 2 GB of RAM. Linux Lite is based on Ubuntu. It is specifically developed to ease Windows users – particularly those with old machines – into the world of Linux. It features familiar tools like Firefox (with built-in support for Netflix), plus VLC Media Player and LibreOffice are preinstalled. The OS also includes the zRAM memory compression tool which makes it run faster on older machines. There’s also a special ‘Lite Upgrade’ utility. Despite its name, this distro isn’t the least resource hungry out there, as it requires both a 1.
