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I'm a beginner, I know little to nothing about everything related to linux, I have a few old laptops and i'm looking for a distro which well be as easy to use as possible and in the same time as lightweghit on resources as possible, It's more importent to me that the distro is simple to use than lightweghit, But in the same time it must be light enough to run on those old laptops, All of my laptops have plenty of hard disk space, They very between 1 to 4 gb of ram, About the processors i'm not sure but they aren't older than 18 years old, I tryed ubuntu and it was simple enough but to slow and i tryed lxle and it was fast enough butn way not enough intuitive for me to use, btw im reviveing those laptops because i want to give them to people in need

(The laptops well be mostly used for browsing the web and simple texst editing, the distro have to be simple to: A) Install on each laptop, B) Install programs on, C) Get comunity support, D) Find guides on, E) Use with diferent keyboards mouses displays etc, F) Create restore points (i expect the people getting the laptops to not know what they are doing), And generaly be user freindly)

THANKS A LOT

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Go for something like xubuntu. Or, try to install Devuan/Debian from a netinstall, adding just the packages you need (xfce is a nice environment usable on old computers). You will also learn a lot in the process.

A word of advice though, for the browser, go with Firefox but do limit the number of concurrent threads. See this page. Set the Content process limit to just 1 and it will work. If you plan to use adblocker, go for ublock origin (not adblock plus).

If you take the xubuntu road, disable tumblerd, it will periodically bring your computer to a halt.

Every decision you make from now on on those computers will be marked by the resources available, but you can run a modern distro on those computers. I know because I do.

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...1 to 4 gb of ram...18 years old, ... browsing the web...

Don't do it; Web browsers are the most RAM hungry applications a novice computer user will use. Anything limited to 4 gigabytes of RAM or less should be recycled, and replaced with a $200 laptop that will offset its own cost, by using mean significantly less energy then the old heaters you have lying around. Or a cheap $50 SBC; https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/ if you really want slow and cheap.

Zswap and links2 -g may help mitigate the low RAM but a $26 ssd would also help.

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