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.

  • ipsirc@lemmy.ml
    ·
    8 months ago

    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/