My super-causal reviews of some lightweight linux distros
I recently dug out an old laptop that ran windows 8.1 and installed linux on it. Since it's not my main computer anymore, i decided to distro hop a bit on it. The computer is roughly a decade old and has only 2 gb of ram, so lightweight distros it is. What I mean by lightweight is that they put little strain on the underlying hardware in terms of for example RAM or CPU useage. Of course, Linux distros in general have much lower system requirements than Windows ever-growing requirements and size, but there are still significant variations in system requirements. So lightweight distros are light by Linux distro standards. Here are reviews of four I've tried out.
Lubuntu and Xubuntu. I'm going to lump them together because they are both variations on Ubuntu, just with different desktop environments. Vanilla Ubuntu uses Gnome, while Lubuntu uses LXQT and Xubuntu uses XFCE, which are both lighter desktop environments. Xubuntu I think is more friendly to older hardware, while Lubuntu abandoned that goal some years back and nowadays don't even have official minimum system requirements. So Xubuntu is probably better as a light-weight version of Ubuntu, although they are both kinda heavy.
And well they're both Ubuntu, and carries a lot of that distro's advantages and disadvantages. Ubuntu due to its focus on user-friendliness is easy to run, and you can get help easily online if something goes wrong due to its large userbase. On the other hand, the developers of Ubuntu, Canonical have gotten a fixation on their own "Snap" file format. And It's just a worse version of flatpaks. They're fine when they run, but take ages to start up, which is annoying. Despite their names, they are not snappy. Overall I prefer Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, but which uses the superior flatpak file format by default instead.
Linux Lite: I dislike this distro. I have reblogged a post that recommended it, and there is one big problem with it: It's default web browser is Google Chrome. That could be forgiveable if I could just go into the distro's software manager and install firefox and uninstall Chrome. But chrome is uninstallable from the software manager and firefox is only avaialble as a snap without command line tinkering. Hard pass, I want to easily get rid of Chrome, Google's proprietary monopolistic mess and snap package firefox is just as annoying here as it is in ubuntu. Linux Mint has an xfce version, the same environment xubuntu and Lite uses, and I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect it's superioror to both of them just because of the lack of Snap bullshit.
AntiX Now this distro really impressed me. It's built to run on anything. "256MB RAM is the recommended minimum for antiX." which is insanely low in 2023. it's one of the few distros to still support 32bit versions. It doesn't even have a desktop environment by default, instead it uses window managers to create a GUI. I was shocked to discover you could install desktop environments from the package manager. And despite everything, it works perfectly fine. It's not super challenging to use, the installation works fine. There are sane default programs like libreoffice and firefox, and a decent selection in the package manager. The window manager desktop is easy to use and very responsive. It was very fast and responsive even when running from an usb stick. Impressive distro to remain perfecatly useable even when it's so light. I will stick to Mint as my daily driver, but if you have an old computer with a low amount of ram, use Antix.
