Hi all, the private school I work at has a tonne of old windows 7/8 era desktops in a student library. The place really needs upgrades but they never seem to prioritise replacing these machines. Ive installed Linux on some older laptops of mine and was wondering if you all think it would be worth throwing a light Linux distro on the machines and making them somewhat usable for a web browsing experience for students? They’re useless as is, running ancient windows OS’s. We’re talking pre-7th gen i5’s and in some cases pentium machines here.
Might be pointless but wonder what you guys think?
I think those reporting success running Linux on old hw should state the distro and window manager that they’re using if they want to provide useful feedback. I’m not in that group, but Tiny Linux comes to mind. Possibly Alpine? Probably better info to be had from daily-drivers.
If the machine has 4GB of RAM, then MATE, XFCE, LXDE, and LXQT will work well. I’ve used all of them on older computers. The distro doesn’t really matter. If it has 8GB of RAM or more, it will run any DE you want to use.
If the machine has less than 4GB of RAM and can’t be upgraded, it’s not going to be very useful. Sure, you can put a lightweight window manager on them, but they are not going to run a web browser well. They could still be used for teaching students how to install Linux though.
or they can be used as a server. trust me it works good as a server.