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I have a Dell Inspiron and an Acer Aspire One, both laptops are about 6-8 years old I believe.

I tried various latest lightweight Linux recommanded by various website articles, including and not limited to Cent OS, Linux Lite, Linux Mint, Lubuntu, Peppermint, Puppy Linux, etc. A lot of them doesn't work on Acer Aspire One. The worst, all of them run slower than what I expect, especially after a days of installing various apps. No games yet, apps like Chrome/Chromium or LibreOffice are slow already, don't even want to bother with games.

Should I install older versions of Linux instead of the newest? If so, which version of which distribution might be better/best?

Nick Chen
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    I doubt you would see any benefit to using an older distribution and it would likely just be a security risk. Your laptops are old and likely underpowered. It is likely that the modern applications require more resources than the laptops are able to provide. It's unlikely that you will see much improvement from one operating system to another. – jesse_b Apr 06 '18 at 18:26
  • No machine that is that new presents any serious problems for distributions. If memory is limited, you just want to use a lighter weight desktop than Gnome or KDE. But there has been almost no substantial change in the last roughly 8 years in the specs of computers beyond a bit more RAM being supported. – Lizardx Apr 06 '18 at 18:28
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    @Lizardx: Those are both budget laptops. From 8 years ago it's likely they have a single core processor and 2GB of memory. Probably have end of life 5200RPM hard drives as well. – jesse_b Apr 06 '18 at 18:30
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    "all of them run slower than what I expect, especially after a days of installing various apps" You simply cannot install a lightweight Linux and then install many apps without it becoming heavyweight Linux. You need to accept limited functionallity. –  Apr 06 '18 at 18:38
  • Yes, both laptops are budget laptops with 2GB memory, 5200RPM HDD, dual (Acer) or quad (Dell) core CPU. Various apps mostly refers to Chromium and Libre Office, then VLC, a downloader and some apps for Android devices like adb. So, everybody's basically saying these old machines are hopeless and helpless. I guess that's the life, they're old anyways. Thanks, everyone! – Nick Chen Apr 06 '18 at 19:00
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    I am installing FreeBSD on legacy hw. However, miracles do not happen, graphical interfaces and chrome will be slow. – Rui F Ribeiro Apr 06 '18 at 19:08

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Unless you're dealing with a really ancient system (for example, something running an 80386) or have hardware that only works with an older kernel version (and the systems you describe meet neither criteria), you should always use the newest version of Linux you can get, as it will almost always be more secure and will usually perform better.

Now, as far as your performance complaints, that's not all that unexpected. Dell Inspiron and Acer Aspire One systems are budget systems, so they're already not going to be high performance, and on top of that you're talking about ones three quarters of a decade old. Even a 300 USD laptop from last year is going to get better performance than those, regardless of what you're running on them. Most likely, both have single or at most double core CPU's running at less than 2GHz, low-end DDR2 memory, and cheap hard drives that are at this point beyond their life expectancy. Note also that LibreOffice is not a particularly good piece of software in terms of performance (try Abiword and Gnumeric if you can get away with just using a word processor and spreadsheet software), and Chrome is also notoriously memory hungry (Midori is a decent lightweight browser option).

You may be able to improve things by replacing the hard drives with SSD's (assuming they're actually SATA drives and not mini-PATA), and if you're really lucky you might be able to replace the wireless adapters (though it is getting harder to find decent mini PCI-e Wifi cards). That may be enough to improve web browsing to tolerable performance levels, but you probably won't be able to do much more to improve things. You may also be able to put in some more RAM which should help significantly, but it might be difficult to find memory modules that actually work with systems that old (if it is DDR2 that they use, you may be out of luck).

Austin Hemmelgarn
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  • Thanks for the recommendation for LibreOffice and Chrome replacement. Apparently, system hangs or significantly slows down more often when I'm using Chromium than anything else. I was always lazy to change browser because I've been using Chrome for probably 10 years, it's time for a change. I just Googled for Midori and it seems it's only for PC only. I'd prefer a web browser works on PC and mobile devices, mainly Android phones and tablets, plus couple of iPads. Would you please recommend something? – Nick Chen Apr 06 '18 at 23:39
  • Double your ram, get used laptop ddr2, probably that's what they use, check first, put 4GB in and your issues will basically be gone. I develop on old hardware, it's not an issue, only the ram matters from my experience as long as you have a dual core cpu at least. I believe those also use sata though I'm not positive, the 6 year old probably, the 8 year old one check. This is cheap, pick up something like crucial ssd, or newegg deals on samsung or whatever, this is really a cheap upgrade if you shop around, and get used ram. – Lizardx Apr 12 '18 at 00:11
  • Apparently, on Acer laptop, RAM was not the problem, but Cinnamon was. I've upgraded from 2 GB to 4GB DDR3 RAM and used for a few days, but the situation was apparently no different. Then I switched to MATE as recommended by cmnybo and it's much smoother. The Dell laptop showed no apparent difference in Ubuntu from 4GB to 8GB DDR3 RAM. Then Linux simply shuts down, I – Nick Chen Apr 28 '18 at 01:40
  • On Dell, Linux simply and always shuts down during booting, some time after logo screen. I've tried to install or run LIVE at least 8 different most up-to-date distros, all shuts down laptop without any error or hang. But Windows OS still works. Weird! – Nick Chen Apr 28 '18 at 01:48
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There is no need to use an old distro for a 6 to 8 year old machine. Just use an up to date distro with a light weight desktop environment like MATE and don't enable Compiz. Linux Mint MATE runs great on my 8 year old thinkpad.

cmnybo
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  • I'm using Linux Mint, but Cinnamon (it's the top choice from official site) instead of MATE. Will MATE with Compiz off most likely run better than Cinnamon? Should I take 32 or 64 bit? – Nick Chen Apr 06 '18 at 23:42
  • MATE runs smoother than Cinnamon for me, but I haven't tried Cinnamon in a few years. Use the 64 bit version since you most certainly have a 64 bit CPU. – cmnybo Apr 08 '18 at 00:49