I know Debian and others can breathe life into older machines. But i wonder if there are any distros with serious optimizations that I haven't heard of. I've already tried MX Linux on an old Thinkpad SL400, and didn't see any difference from plain Debian.
Update: thanks for the great suggestions. Forgot to say many distros feel zippy and fast until you open a web browser. Appreciate your thoughts on which web browser to use too. So far I've had a positive experience with Thorium and Chromium.
The problem with older machines is the web browsing, not the system itself. You could use a browser with Java script disabled but a lot of websites will refuse to work.
You have to sacrifice with browser functionality to improve performance.
Try: https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux <-- It was designed for really old hardwares.
I’ve already tried MX Linux on an old Thinkpad SL400, and didn’t see any difference from plain Debian.
Because it's the stock Debian + custom themes/skins + some crappy useless minitools. The 99% of packages come from the official Debian repository, the rest are only the rice.
If you have newer machine than a real 386:
- https://kisslinux.org/
- https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
- https://www.glaucuslinux.org/
- https://www.alpinelinux.org/
- https://voidlinux.org/
So Slackware? If you can cross-compile then maybe gentoo. I'm not sure if Raspberry Pi Desktop is x86.
I'm pretty sure you can have a minimal slack and choose xfce in the installer.
If you want serious optimizations - then Gentoo is your choice. But seriously, there won't be any serious difference between distributions. What really matters here are DEs and browsers. I would recommend some kind of lightweight window manager like i3 or dwm. If you do not want to configure everything yourself, then your choice is lxde/lxqt. Also, you can use distros without systemd (void, artix, devuan, gentoo etc), but that does not matter that much.
