So far, my old beast of a computer (Pentium 4 2.8GHz Northwood, 1.5GBs of RAM, Nvidia Geforce 6200, 80GB Maxtor HDD) has been very naughty. Running Windows XP is fine, as long as I don't have a modern day web browser or something open, so web browsing is out of the question, but then Ubuntu isn't stable on it. I'm thinking about either building an ArchLinux install on it, or trying OpenBox, maybe Gentoo on it, I'm not sure which path would be the best. Any suggestions?
Anything other then straight up ubuntu will probably be fine.
Personally I would just stick with antegros. It is a plain arch install with XFCE which is nice and light weight.
Opensuse with XFCE would not be bad either.
You might also wanna try linux mint cinnamon. It should run, and it is less buggy than ubuntu.
Never tried Antergos, I'm going to try it. I didn't like OpenSUSE for some reason, and archlinux, nice as it is, tends to be a hassle on older hardware so that'll be my very last option haha.
So far, I've screwed up creating a USB three times in a row mixing up the bittorrent file with the ISO file.. facepalm
Does Unetbootin do something funny to the installation files? Neither my laptop nor the old PC will boot from the flash drive properly.
Unetbootin is just weird and i completely dislike it. A better alternative is Rufus. Windows only though but still better.
Windows xp should run fine on your hardware. My old desktop had a pentium 4 2.4Ghz, 1.75 GBs of ram, A geforce 2, 40 GB hdd. I ran it with a resolutions of 1024x1280 at 75Hz i could watch 720p videos, play counter-strike, watch youtube, etc.
Another alternative, that doesn't mess with the boot menu and boot files, is TuxBoot. Just fair warning, they do host their files on SourceForge but I have had no issues with them.
If you expect stability I'd recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon over Arch. Arch is much too exciting for daily use in my opinion. Arch is built on the concept that it includes new software whenever the developers of that software say it's stable enough. This has led to some devs using the Arch users as their beta testers. For example KDE does this.
If you're feeling even more conservative I'd recommend Debian stable or CentOS.
I got Antergos installed but now I'm stuck with a white screen on start up. Apparently an Nvidia GeForce 6200 doesn't play nice with Linux nvidia drivers.
Now I've got the correct drivers and GDM installed and it just locked up. Ugh.