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Hi!
Someone asked me to revive their 20 year old laptop as its no longer working on their installation of windows XP.
This baby has around 512MB of Ram, 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom.
This is my first time doing something with hardware older than myself so I'd love some insight from people around.
Lots of good options already given, to throw a couple more one the pile Slackware if you want to play around with Linux more for a hobbyist than a user, Tails for a small Debian based security focused distro, or FreeBSD for something completely different but familiar, I've installed that on some pretty tiny hardware and it ran fine including an x86/atom CPU.
I don’t know for the other but tails doesn’t exist as a 32bit version, does it? I’m also not sure it would very comfortable on 512mb ram.
Yep that's my bad, looks like that's some old info I should have checked on. Tails dropped 32 bit x86 support in 2017 & wants more memory. A month ago freeBSD released a beta for 15.0 dropping support which is a bigger bummer for me since I like that OS for old hardware. Slackware still supports 32 and 64 bit architectures.
Are the BSDs generally good/workable on older hardware, especially laptops? I don’t really have a clue (no knowledge beyond Linux) but if so it sounds like a nice use for an old laptop, as a learning tool.
I used it for that reason on one of those mini acer aspire one atom CPU laptops and another that was x86 Intel and didn't have any problems. I think it's a common use case but not the purpose of the OS just as general purpose not specifically targeting old hardware. It looks like they are switching to 64 bit only if the current beta is indicative of the next release which is very likely.
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/what-to-expect-on-upcoming-15-0-release.98543/