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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Puppy Linux runs on a potato of any architecture and is super user friendly (grandpa certified)! Only 300 MB or so. https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
I know a lot of people recommended Mint, which I personally use on my very modern budget gaming pc, but you should really try Puppy Linux, it's meant for the exact use case you're describing.
Try mint with Xfce - on 64 bit machines and then go lighter.
alright and are you sure that is the best starter option? also what can i do on linux compared to windows?
best option
Ubuntu is popular and new-user friendly. And xfce is generally lighter on resources. It's a good choice.
What can I do
Almost everything.
Some proprietary apps you've used from windows may not be available, but equivalent ones would be available on linux.
Stuff like browsing the web(provided that you don't open too many tabs, because you have low ram) and watching movies n all is quite good.
What all things fo you intend to do on it? I think it'll be easier to check that the things you want are there.
There's very little windows can do, which linux can't also. The difference will be in how, and how easily.
Often the answer is just "install the same program, and just use it like normal". Other times, you have to go out of your way to get something running using wine.
For this, bottles is a GUI manager that can make life a lot easier.
Something that uses XFCE is a really good starting point for weak hardware. And mint is a good option for someone new to linux. It is based on ubuntu, and there is plenty of info online on how do things on ubuntu.
It also has good default repos, meaning you'll be able to find and install most software you might need, without having to start fiddling with custom software repos.
Just be warned that your family members will probably have (usually solvable) issues if they want to do anything beyond web browsing. It's a different operating system after all and it works differently in a lot of ways. Definitely recommend looking up some videos about Mint, XFCE, transitioning from Windows to Linux.
It has everything you may want to use - LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird ...
Some programs aren't supported for Linux but you can find replacement. For me it has 100% of tools that I need.
When you go from windows to mint - they feel similar (UI), but some things are different (installing programs, settings...)
It is just solid out of the box experience. You don't have to customise it to be usable, complete suite of programs and it is stable.
Some of really light distros for old PCs are missing lot of these things but you may need to explore those options if it doesn't run well.
Think of it as Windows 7 in terms of functionality but with a Windows Vista/XP GUI.
That said, your CPU's performance will increase noticebly on Linux.
I think Pop OS is a great place to start. I haven't personally used it but Linux Mint is commonly recommended to people who have only used windows before, it tries to have a similar UI experience.
Linux can do most things windows can, except it's free. The best thing about Linux is the depositories, unlike windows you rarely download apps from the Internet, instead you can download them from a repository. In Pop OS it's called Pop shop, it's different depending on which OS you are using.
My favorite very light is peppermintOS, I think you may have to go back to version 10 for 32 bit though.
For a more "friendly flavored" distro, MX Linux is Debian-based and comes with a bunch of quality of life tools
MX Linux seconded. It's available in 32-bit versions, too.
I haven't used it on a machine with less than 4GB though, but it runs well on an old Dell laptop from 2009.
I've used Debian on an old netbook with an Intel Atom and onyl 2GB RAM. The experience wasn't so bad but web browsing was definitely a pain. Video calling and watching YouTube (Firefox) was very sluggish and annoying to deal with. It's fine for working with documents and watching low resolution videos locally but that's about it.
I've also tried antiX but a lot of the defaults were annoying. If you (or your family members) can deal with it, then it's probably the best lightweight Linux distro out there.
are there any linux distros that might work becasue im a noob who uses windows so im very lost. any tips or suggestions or something would be great.
In this case, I recommend just leaving your family members to do their own thing. From my experience, it is very hard to manage other people's Linux issues if you don't have decent knowledge on it yourself. If they don't want to upgrade, that's their problem. Not yours.
those are very low specs for every day distros (meaning usable for the general public), you might get away with linux mint xfce, if it ends up usable on those machine and not lag too much then don't bother with anything else, otherwise you might have to install lighter stuff like antix or lxle. If none of the above are usable you can always install puppy linux, it can run on a toaster but is not very pleasant to use. note that regardless of distro, surfing the web is going to be a chore due to half of the modern internet being heavy as fuck and hard to run, you might want to look for alternative frontend to websites like piped for youtube, urlebird for tiktok etc.
Puppy Linux is made for old machines and generally just works. You can boot it up on a live USB and see what you think. Lots of flavours to choose from.
Not a Linux power user, still very much new although I've done a bit of distrohopping before.
I loaded Fedora with KDE on an old laptop from 2012-13ish last weekend. Been having a good, smooth run with it so far so that's where my vote goes. However, the memory specs you indicated for your family's hardware might be tough.
Considering that you're planning to use this with family members who aren't tech savvy, and as you're essentially new to Linux yourself, I would suggest something like Zorin OS. The familiarity and ease of use should help you get started fairly quickly, even for newbies. There are a lot of other great distros, of course, some of which were mentioned here, but the learning curve for those can be just a bit steeper. As someone who's essentially the "tech guy" of the family, believe me when I say you don't want them to keep bugging you about questions or tech help because they "don't understand" Linux. You want something that you just install and leave be.
Speaking of something that you can just install and leave, this isn't strictly Linux, but a great OS to use for non-tech savvy family members is Chrome OS. Get Chrome OS Flex, install it on an old laptop, give it to your family members and call it a day. I've had success with it for some of my family members who've wanted to revive old laptops. It's a lot more limited than full featured desktop operating systems, of course, but it's perfectly suitable for the basic stuff. Best of all, it's so easy to use that you usually wouldn't even have to play tech support for your family for it.
Lubuntu!
I put Lubuntu on a Chromebook with only 16 GB storage. It's a great OS for shit systems.
AntiX is quite good on older hardware but beware of the fact they don't use systemd. Nice effort to try and use newer init services but a lot of things really depend on systemd being installed.
WattOS (which uses systemd) is also very performant on old rigs but it needs more tweaking OOTB I'd say.
I'd suggest Debian with LXDE, which, from my personal experience, works pretty fine on low-end computers. You can replace LXDE with your choice of Windows Managers for an even lighter system, but that might be a little hard if you've never used Linux before.
I'd suggest Linux mint Debian edition, at least for the 32bit machine. Many distros have stopped supporting 32bit lately.
It should be fairly user friendly.
I'd like to do something similar on my Pentium 3 box. Maybe Debian with a really light WM would be a good fit, maybe IceWM? It only has 512MB of RAM though so I might have to go even lighter than Debian. I also have an Athlon XP box with 2GB of RAM, but that's too new to be fun. :p
Puppy Linux runs on a potato of any architecture and is super user friendly (grandpa certified)! Only 300 MB or so for the OS and very little RAM use. https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
since you're a noob, idk if this will be very helpful to you, but
i used debian with awesomewm on an old pentium 4 from 2004-2005 and it was pretty fast! like a modern low-end computer. but you'd have to configure it to be noob-friendly/have patient users. i don't mind it cuz i enjoy tinkering, but i imagine it could be very frustrating for other people.
i'd give you my awesomewm config (i configured it to be super minimal, but also familiar, as i was trying to create a desktop environment that could be used on older machines), but unfortunately my desktop no longer has a power supply, so i can't access it :')
Browser choice is probably going to make just as much difference as distro choice. Modern browsers kinda need at least 1 GB to be usable, ideally more. Depends what you do with it of course.
Try Pale Moon, Falkon and Konqueror.
Void's xfce desktop release is awesome for old hardware but it takes a bit to setup.
There are some distros out there intended for low power machines, but usually you'll be fine installing whatever distro you want and using a lightweight desktop environment for it. Any distro running a DE like Xfce or LxQt should feel pretty decent on older hardware.
I've said my peace about distro and desktop environment in another comment, but to answer the piece about what you can do as compared to Windows, Linux can do the vast majority of all your daily tasks. There are a couple of big sticking points, generally.
Microsoft products, i.e. Microsoft Office. There are alternatives available in the Linux space that do a great job and are good enough for probably 95-98% of people, but there are cases where they don't quuiiiite match up. Formatting PowerPoints, for example. You may save a *.pptx from LibreOffice and a colleague will open it in Microsoft PowerPoint and it doesn't look the same at all.
The other major software suite that keeps people in Windows is Adobe. Photoshop? Lightroom? Premiere? Not available on Linux. Again, there are alternatives, but they're never quite as good. I say this as a photographer that runs 100% Linux all the time, I miss my photo editing software! I used Capture One, but the same principle applies. There's no Linux release, and you can't get it running on Linux no matter how much you tinker.
The third biggest sticking point is gaming. You can game on Linux. It's better now than ever. I run AAA brand new releases on my PC, and again I'm 100% Linux. BUT! It does frequently require a little more elbow grease to get working than people are used to, and often times you can never get it to work 100% as well as it would in Windows.
Sorry for the big wall of text. But finally I just want to say, none of this is to dissuade you from putting Linux on those machine. Quite the contrary! I want you to be aware of what the pitfalls may be, so you can look out for them. I'd hate for you to go in expecting everything to be 1:1 with Windows, only for something to not work and it feel like a bad experience in the end.
Alpine Linux is one to look at.
MX Linux works good on old hardware.
If you're looking for a DE, XFCE might even feel sluggish on older hardware. You can go lighter with LXQt or use the Pixel Desktop that Raspberry Pi OS has (which is modified LXDE).
Anything with Xfce or MATE, such as Mint Xfce or MATE
There is Tiny Core Linux if you want something really lightweight.
With 1GB of RAM, you will have trouble running a modern web browser without swapping. I would suggest checking if the RAM can be upgraded. You can get older RAM really cheaply. 4GB of RAM and a cheap SSD will improve performance significantly.
I have experience with low end devices, since I'm a broke Brazilian (currently using a device with 2gb ram as my daily driver), and these are my suggestions:
You face 2 problems, low end hardware and low tech users, so going deep into very lightweight distros will affect usability. I find mxlinux to be a good middle ground of optimized for low end hardware and easy to use. This step is important, because you don't want people calling you all the time for help
Now, I suggest running the 32bit of mxlinux on all computers with less than 4gb of ram, because it makes a LOT of difference, from a machine unable to browse the internet, to a machine that works nicely. Even if you use the 64 bit version, enabling multi arch and running at least the 32bit browser makes a huge difference.
And another important thing is to use the same distro and gui on all devices, because it helps them and allows them to help each other, instead of calling you all the time. Helps with maintenance too.
I, personally, would suggest Debian 12 especially since they still supply 32 bit ISOs. (Also 64 bit, but that's kind of a given at this point)
Since they provide both 64 and 32 bit ISOs and run the same thing, all support issues can be done exactly the same on all the computers since, I assume, there is no dedicated graphics card (Nvidia, AMD) in any of them.
Here's a link to the downloads: https://www.debian.org/distrib/
Download from the "complete installation image" area on the left, second section down.
Edit: If you can use a DVD or USB then use the DVD link, but if they can't then the CD image will also work.
Fully agree on Debian, as long as you're up for a learning curve. In terms of performance it's fine; I've run it on a machine with a 40MHz processor back in the day with no GUI and it worked fine. If your machine can do XFCE then so much the better than that. Just be aware that there's a bit of learning curve - if you're unfamiliar, just expect that there'll be some adjustment period and learning / things not working right while you figure it out stage, and expect to read documentation and have technical challenges involved.
I would also recommend if you do go this route to do small images instead of complete images. "Complete" is for if you expect to have no internet (so have to download everything you might possibly need.) Small is fine in 99% of cases. Installing from the internet is exactly as easy as installing from disk, except that you don't need to find the disk and you don't need to download a big honkin' disk image with 5% of packages you'll use and 95% which you won't ever touch. Debian is big.
This answer is getting down voted, but Debian is the answer because it is user friendly and supports 32bit. If you need to seriously bring new life to these machines upgrade the RAM and buy SSDs. Using a lightweight desktop environment like MATE is a good option.
Don't give users unfamiliar with Linux a window manager or Arch.
I would suggest Mint. Considering the hardware, the XFCE version. Have you looked into any hardware upgrades for these machines? I've found that a simple ram or hdd-->ssd upgrade can be rather inexpensive these days.
Strongly Agreed. Linux mint isn't the lightest OS around, but it's a great entry into Linux for a windows user.
It may be worth going on cragislist or Ebay for hardware upgrades - Lots of people are parting out computers of this era while they can still be sold instead of turning into e-waste
There are a lot of distros which are more focused on old hardware than Mint, but Mint definitely wins in the "this distro will be familiar and discoverable to people who are used to Windows" department. If it works, it's great for that reason.
Ya, I think in a case like this, it's best to go with the most user friendly and easy to pick up distro