So I begin with the tale of discovering an "old" (That's an understatement) laptop that my old man was about to throw out since it hadn't been used in years.The inner nerd/environmentalist inside me couldn't take such an injustice and I told myself (as I have done with many things I don't currently use) that I would find some use for it.
Now this laptop is rocking a Pentium M processors at a grand clock speed of 1.40GHZ and a whopping 512MB of RAM. Along with some 160GB HDD, trackpad, Keyboard with a missing key, screen, etc. Now I formatted it and Installed a "lite version of XP" and set it up as a low powered Bittorent Client as well as using Bittorent Sync to backup stuff from various mobile devices as well as easily transfer documents, music, Pictures and what ever else. It's worked great for this and some other things but it is almost completely unusable for any basic computer usage whether that's email, or browsing the web, or even typing something into notepad/Word.
I've tried various versions of Ubuntu (old versions and LUbuntu), Cent OS and some other random stuff. Now I'm not much of a Linux user (if at all) but if someone could recommend an extremly basic/clean Linux distribution that can run on Hardware this old (again all I'm really looking for is browsing the web and typing out some word documents) I'd be grateful. If it works out I'll probably hand this laptop down to my younger sibling so that he can mess around with Linux and learn more than I ever did.
512 MB on a Pentium M... that's luxury for linux lolz. You can run anything you want on that. For best performance, I would definitely recommend a Slackware based minimal distro, like Puppy Linux (512 MB is enough to run Puppy Racy, you don't need to run Puppy Wary even), or Vector Linux, or Salix OS (that's one I like very much in the latest versions!). But if you want to run Fedora 21 with XFCE on it, it's definitely possible, and it won't be a nightmare, it will work much better than you would ever have expected.
Another path would be to go for a BSD system. BSD offers a few features on 512 MB that require a bit more on most Linux distros, or that aren't well developed on very small Linux distros. For an easy entry into BSD, take a look at PC-BSD.
Your specs are good for Linux, most distros will run on it, I highly recommend something of the Arch flavour, Manjaro possibly, if you dare brave it, go for the Arch base setup, if you wish to learn linux and make that lappy quick, plus its very clean, so clean there is not even a X Server before you start lol.
Debian is another great one, Avoid CentOS, unless setup correctly it can be bloated and its very stale, the packages from deb are newer than what centos provide you, and you can always upgrade to testing and a newer kernel, something I found rather pissy in CentOS, even though I have a red hat sub.
BSD is another good tool, personally I would use Linux over BSD though, better support.
So from me it is Arch Base, just follow the beginners guide online and you will be fine, just use ethernet connection in setup
porteus was designed to be ran off of a flash drive, so the entire OS is less than 400MB. the site has a wide selection of distros to choose from as well as several other options
Yeah, I'll definatly check out some of the distros you guys mentioned above and all of you guys keep saying that 512MB is enough but running the smallest most lite versions of Linux mint and LUbuntu I could find ... I coudn't even open a second tab on chrome without the machine slowing down to an unusable state.
Out of everything mentioned above what would you say is the easiest to use for someone whose never used anything but Windows? Again just basic web browsing/Documents/Excel stuff is all I'm really looking for WHILE still being smooth.
Also can someone explain in simple terms the difference between Linux and BSD? I've heard a lot of good things about both but a basic list describing what each is good for (Each being at the core I know both have many different distributions) and what they aren't good for.
Also (sorry for so many question but I guess this is why I chose this community to ask) Can someone provide a breif overview between the different "desktops" one can use? Are these similar to Launchers on an Android device?
Can any "Desktop" be used on any Linux distribution?
I was checking out Porteus and it gives you 4 options between KDE4, MATE, XFCE, and LXQt .... I believe Gnome ( I think is what Ubuntu uses) is similar to these as well correct?
I've had really good success/performance with using Lubuntu (very light-weight stripped-down version of Ubuntu) on very weak/low-spec machines.
You have to remember that webpages can use up quite a bit of data (ram) depending on the amount of media content on the page. So it's not so much that the OS is too resource-heavy, but that web browsing these days is far more resource-demanding than it used to be. It's somewhat unavoidable.
Windows mentality with the RAM thing, seriously dont think Linux will run the same as Windows with the hardware you have, you can use some Linux distros on 3MB of RAM, and the fact you can strip things out, normally on laptops I remove Ethernet related things, I also use extremely light environments, and I have been using text more than GUI, seriously Windows stripped is more bloated than Linux.
Also Ubuntu is bloated as hell, to be honest a lot are, there no were near Windows levels, but Ubuntu is bloated, this is because its used for beginners and Unity is a "3D" desktop.
Try Debian, debian is very light, Arch base is also, gentoo would run easily on that hardware and would be faster than Windows ever could be.
Puppy, or any of the small distros really. Stripped down distros with stripped down Window Managers instead of Desktop Environments will run really well on that hardware, however don't expect to run a browser like Firefox or Chrome/Chromium on it as they're too ram hungry.
You might be ok if you can force the mobile versions of web pages to load as it wasn't long ago that most phones only had 512Mb of ram.
I still remember running DamnSmallLinux on a 486DX 66Mhz w/ 16Mb of ram just to see if their claims where true, they where, even ran the really early version of Firefox, or was it even Firefox yet on that old box.
Chrome is a hog with it's integrated plugins. You'll have better luck with chromium or firefox (preferably with µmatrix or noscript), but don't expect to run more than 3 or 4 tabs semi-smoothly on ~400 MB of RAM. There's also lighter browsers out there, but 512 MB of RAM should still be sufficient for basic use.
BSD is Unix based same as Linux, BSD is used on Macs and of course BSD systems, but it more a licencing thing.
On linux if you provide code or edit it, you must correctly provide the rights to the creator of the software, in BSD you dont, you want to alter it and take it for your self, do so, but you still dont own it, the community do, imaging a more relaxed GNU.
apart from that BSD is behind in terms of development compared to Linux, the differences would be small to the standard user.
you have 2 types, WM - Window managers, DE - Desktop environments.
KDE, MATE etc are different desktops, at the surface they look different, but stuff like KDE and GNOME3 provide specific apps designed to work best and look the best with their desktops, but you can mix and match.
they also provide different performance hits, GNOME and KDE are the big fat boys, while LXDE is a skinny chap.
WM are different, these are normally text desktops, you execute commands and do everything through the terminal, but with stuff like bspwm, you can make it fancy, imagine what a linux admin looks at all day, its that but with more eye candy they offer a lot better performance but can lack in features, there good for showing off to friends also (If you have nerd linux friends)
If the app is in the repos, which chances are it is, then yes it can be used on any distro.