Your price to value ratio on those computers is excellent. With a price of $0, return is infinite! :-)
Your current machine will probably do fine with MX Linux, antiX, or some of the other distributions mentioned by other commenters.
I like the MX/antiX collection of utilities to help you set up a USB drive. You could buy a USB 3 thumb drive of 64 GB or larger capacity (make sure it has a USB type A plug for your computer), and use the tools from MX Linux to set up the thumb drive to boot Linux. How-to guides are available at mxlinux.org. Then shut down the computer, restart it, and tell it to boot from USB if available, before it attempts to start Windows from the hard disk. Now you can test out if Linux will work for you.
If so, you could continue to run it off the thumb drive, or you could then install it to the hard drive. Permanent installation makes for more convenience, but there are a couple of gotchas because Windows assumes it has the hard drive all to itself, with hibernation/suspend as a key problem area rather than shutting the machine off when done.
If MX runs too slowly, try again with antiX. Also, when you shut down Linux, be sure to unplug the thumb drive, as Windows doesn't know what to do with it and will prompt you to format it - erasing everything on it.
MX offers a choice of user interfaces. I prefer KDE as a smoother experience. If it is too slow, try again with the default version which provides XFCE as the user interface. These bits of jargon refer only to how you navigate windows and menus, not to the overall functionality of programs you run.
There may be some troubleshooting up front if you have very unusual hardware or particular types of video cards. Once everything is up and running with Linux, it usually doesn't randomly go bad over time like Windows.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
Re: Computin' like it's 1984
Date: 2024-02-11 12:10 am (UTC)Your current machine will probably do fine with MX Linux, antiX, or some of the other distributions mentioned by other commenters.
I like the MX/antiX collection of utilities to help you set up a USB drive. You could buy a USB 3 thumb drive of 64 GB or larger capacity (make sure it has a USB type A plug for your computer), and use the tools from MX Linux to set up the thumb drive to boot Linux. How-to guides are available at mxlinux.org. Then shut down the computer, restart it, and tell it to boot from USB if available, before it attempts to start Windows from the hard disk. Now you can test out if Linux will work for you.
If so, you could continue to run it off the thumb drive, or you could then install it to the hard drive. Permanent installation makes for more convenience, but there are a couple of gotchas because Windows assumes it has the hard drive all to itself, with hibernation/suspend as a key problem area rather than shutting the machine off when done.
If MX runs too slowly, try again with antiX. Also, when you shut down Linux, be sure to unplug the thumb drive, as Windows doesn't know what to do with it and will prompt you to format it - erasing everything on it.
MX offers a choice of user interfaces. I prefer KDE as a smoother experience. If it is too slow, try again with the default version which provides XFCE as the user interface. These bits of jargon refer only to how you navigate windows and menus, not to the overall functionality of programs you run.
There may be some troubleshooting up front if you have very unusual hardware or particular types of video cards. Once everything is up and running with Linux, it usually doesn't randomly go bad over time like Windows.
C from C