What’s the Best Linux Distro for Older PCs and Laptops?

While I’ve never been a full-time Linux user, I’ve always tried to stay abreast of developments on the platform. With the recent release of Ubuntu Unity and all the controversy that it has thrown up, I thought it was a good time to road-test some distros. However I’m not interested in installing Linux on my desktop PC because I like playing games on it. No, I need Linux for my older PCs and laptops.

For the purposes of this round-up I used an IBM T60 Thinkpad – an old road-warrior’s laptop that I picked up for free from an old employer after it had done its three years active duty. It’s equipped with 500Mb of RAM, a 60Gb hard drive and a T2400 Centrino Duo CPU running at 1.8Ghz. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a powerful PC, by modern standards.

However Linux has always run well on this laptop and despite the system specs of my test machine, I didn’t envisage running into any huge issues. Turns out that I was somewhat naive in that belief – Linux, in many of its main distributions has evidently moved forward a lot since I last checked it out, about 18 months ago.

Ubuntu Unity

The first distro I tried on my Thinkpad was Ubuntu Unity. Anyone who’s familiar with this distro and has noted the specs of my laptop is probably pissing themselves laughing right now. But I hadn’t read much about Unity prior to installing it and thus didn’t envisage any hassles.

The installation was absolutely flawless. There was virtually no input required from me during the install, beyond telling the OS to use all of that massive 60Gb hard drive and letting it know what the password to my router was so it could update sources as it installed. About 30 minutes later it had finished and booted to the desktop.

It was immediately apparent to me at this stage, that Ubuntu Unity and my elderly laptop were not going to play well together. The interface was very sluggish right from the get-go, with even the system bar menus taking their time to appear on-screen. I persevered and tried some applications, but they too seemed to be suffering from the new interface.

This was a great sadness to me because I have to say I absolutely loved the way Unity is arranged. Yes, it clearly borrows heavily from OSX’s sensibilities, but not so much that you’d accuse it of being some cheap knock-off. What I particularly liked about the interface was the way it clawed back the desktop from the applications and the OS, ensuring that as much of the screen as possible was devoted to actual software. For instance, with Firefox maximised, there’s only one small incongruous black bar at the top of the screen – everything else is devoted to the web pages you’re viewing. When you’re working on a 1024×768 resolution display, such as my Thinkpad’s, things like this make a huge difference.

After suffering with the speed of Unity for a day, I decided that it had to go. It looks great, software installation is a dream, the interface’s workflow is terrific, but you shouldn’t consider installing it on anything too ancient or your desktop will resemble a slideshow.

Fedora 16

Next up on my test list was Fedora. I was looking forward to this one, because I’d heard a lot about its new Gnome-based interface and was keen to put it through its paces. Unfortunately I was to be disappointed.

I booted off the Fedora CD and was soon at the disc-based desktop. It looked great and I wasted no time in clicking on the installation icon and setting Fedora off on installing to my Thinkpad’s hard drive. After about 10 minutes I looked in on the installation and noticed that it had stopped with an error message.

It turns out that Fedora will completely refuse to install on systems with less than 768Mb of RAM. On one level that’s fair enough, a couple of Gbs of RAM has been seen as a minimum for some time now. On another level, however, it’s depriving a lot of people of installing this venerable operating system on their PCs and laptops. I was disappointed not to be able to take Fedora 16 for a spin, but on we went.

Mint 11

Next up for my distro tests was Linux Mint. Again, I’d heard great things about this distro, which has managed to differentiate itself in a crowded marketplace and win plenty of advocates along the way.

One of the reasons I was keen to try Mint is that it has eschewed the latest desktop iterations of Gnome and KDE in favour of the old-school Gnome 2. It has been heavily tweaked by the Mint team, losing the top bar for instance, but it’s still the Gnome 2 we’ve come to know and love.

As with the other distros, installation of Mint was quick and painless. Within 25 minutes it had booted to the desktop and that familiar green and white styling. The immediate impression is of a desktop that’s past its prime, but aging gracefully.

Unfortunately, in everyday use, Mint 11 proved to be too slow to put up with. It’s not nearly as bad as Unity, but particularly when coming out of hibernation it took an eternity to recover and on several occasions was so sluggish I had to reboot it. The sluggishness even extended as far as the speed with which web pages were rendered. High points were the Software Manager which, like most of these distros was a world away from the bad old days of Red Hat era Linux and the icons.

I can’t say I was especially taken by the interface, it’s like an angular version of XP with the Fisher Price colours replaced with silver and green. The main menu was a bit disappointing too, they tried to cram way too much stuff in there, to the extent that it takes up two thirds of my desktop when open.

Ubuntu LTS

After the disappointment of Unity, Mint 11 and Fedora 16, I hit Google to find if there were *any* recommended Linux distros for older hardware. General consensus was that Puppy Linux was a great option for older machines, but its interface looked like some nasty leftover from a love session between Windows ME and Amiga OS so I gave it a miss. Instead I downloaded the Ubuntu LTS distro which was recommended to me by a Linux aficionado.

Must admit I didn’t know much about this before downloading it, but basically, this is the old pre-Unity version of Ubuntu originally released in 2010, but which will be supported all the way through to mid 2013. I downloaded the distro and ran the familiar installation process. After about half an hour I was at the pre-Unity style Ubuntu desktop.

So how did it perform? In a word – brilliantly. It was an absolute joy using Ubuntu 10.04 after the other distros. All the sluggishness that I’d experienced with the Unity and Mint was gone and I suddenly found myself with a zippy little laptop easily up to the task of basic work duties.

All of the hardware in my ThinkPad was recognised without issue and I had no problems getting online by cable or wi-fi. If I have any gripes about it, it’s that the interface takes up a lot of desktop real estate – with Firefox maximised you lose a serious amount of space at the top of the screen to redundant bars of one sort or another. But it’s a minor criticism – everything else works really well, from the Libre Office Suite to Banshee Media player.

So, based on my experiences with my elderly ThinkPad, if you’re looking for a Linux distro that combines a good looking interface with great performance, then Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is definitely worth a look. It’s ideal for office work, anything cloud based, playing music or video – pretty much everything in fact except processor intensive activities like high-end gaming, rendering and video editing.