So our properly good laptop died (motherboard failure).
I have been given a wee Packard Bell thing with a Pentium T2390 and 1gb ram.
It has elderly Ubuntu (7!) on it.
Thoughts on what OS?
I can get win7 but would rather not fork out.

Try Ubuntu latest, if it’s not any good then swap it out and you have lost a couple of hours. I’m running it behind my work machine and it’s doing fine.

Mint but with a lighter desktop, like xfce would get my vote.

Download Unetbootin, which is a free tool to make bootable USB images. Then you can download a few diffent Linux (live) distros and see which runs best/you like the look of without wasting a load of DVDs.

My picks would be Bodhi (Enlightenment desktop) and Elementary, both Ubuntu based and run great on my OH’s older Macbook.

Some flavour of Ubuntu which isn’t Ubuntu (ie doesn’t have Unity). Personally I’m using Ubuntu Gnome and Lubuntu (the latter for low system requirements).

Debian + XFCE4

…of course this thread could just be a survey of which OS people are using. I always think “I should try that” when some other flavour gets mentioned, but life is too short (and I’m busy trying to keep on top of knowing what I’m doing with W7, XP, Centos and Fedora, all of which I’m regularly providing support for).

I think you’ll struggle to get the latest Ubuntu running on that. Try Lubuntu. Elementary OS is also very good but I think you will struggle with resources even for that.

after I did jump in with an answer I’ll come back with the proper question – what are you going to do with it?
Regardless of the spec if all your doing is web browsing etc then the unity desktop is fine – it upsets the geeks who don’t like seeing things dumbed down for normal people (they would all still prefer command line and binary pron) but it works fine.

So is it a web browser or more?

If it’s just for web browsing (or even if it’s not), give ChromeOS a go?

the proper question – what are you going to do with it?

100% agree

unity should be fine, as should gnome3, cinammon, etc. BUT if it’s a lappy with ubuntu 7.04 / 7.10, I’m assuming it’s a 2007 era machine?
Might struggle with any desktop designed to be run with full GPU (which includes w7, w8, etc.), or possibly might not even run at all. If so… that’d start hinting towards Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint with XFCE, etc.

depends what it’s going to do.

Windows 7 is great.

Windows 7 is great.

It sits out the way and is barely noticeable, which is all I want from an OS.

Just resurrected a couple of old laptops as browsing machines. I tried a lot of different Linux variants, and finally settled on Peppermint OS. It was easy to install, runs well on old hardware and involved the least post installation tweaking to get everything running.

Well I installed latest Ubuntu, faffed with printer driver, but it runs fine. £5 worth of 1gb rab boost ordered as well.

^ with Unity, or a different desktop? I found Unity tricky to fathom.

really, it didn’t take long. The top button is like typing what you want to run into the Win7 Start menu, stuff your using is on the left and the most used is there too.

If it’s just a bit of web – that what I mostly use mine for it’s easy. Install Chrome & Skype – run them.

Whatever the standard no faff desktop is…

I installed Kubuntu* 14.04 alpha last night and everything worked perfectly! Haven’t even found a bug yet!

I say stick on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS upon release.

*Ubuntu with a flash KDE desktop.

mikewsmith – Member

really, it didn’t take long. The top button is like typing what you want to run into the Win7 Start menu, stuff your using is on the left and the most used is there too.

If it’s just a bit of web – that what I mostly use mine for it’s easy. Install Chrome & Skype – run them.

There are loads of things wrong with it, like the annoying design and bugs of the global menu, stupid scrollbars, inconsistency all over the place, various other irks.
I imagine it would be fine just web browsing and skype on a netbook, but try it on a machine with a big screen, or dual monitors.

It’s like they had a look at iOS and OSX and tried to shove it all into one desktop. Global menus: check, window buttons on the left: check, icon dock: check, application search: check…but they missed Apple’s careful implementation of each of those things.

the unity desktop is fine – it upsets the geeks who don’t like seeing things dumbed down for normal people

try it on a machine with a big screen, or dual monitors.

I’m a massive geek, and using unity every day on 3 big monitors.

It’s not perfect but it’s fine. *whisper* I actually like it better than any other linux desktop I’ve tried…

Think most of the dislike for Unity and Gnome 3 was by longterm Linux users having something different “forced” upon them, both of which increased mouseclicks etc. to do what they’d being doing for years, and removing features, moving min/max/close buttons etc. And the early versions of both were awful.

Both have moved on a lot since then. Both have loads of deleted features added back in. Both, afaik, you can restore the min/max/close buttons to the right side and in the right order. Both are pretty quick (quicker than w7 on my work lappy).

Cinnamon is my choice on the desktop. Gnome 3 underpinnings matched with an old-school layout, and useful features that were binned in the Gnome 2 to 3 update added back in. But it’s well slow on my netbook, so that’s going back to XFCE.