for many old systems I run peppermint, you have a lot of choices of DE. and a tremendous resource of applications you can customize with.
many people like ubuntu flavors but they are not my cup of tea!
mx is a good distro that can do a lot but there is a little more learning curve( not much though)
Its one of the few distros I recommend for someone switching to linux
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I actually run alpine on my Odroid-N2. It hosts my home assistant server and HASSIO environment. Pretty stable, but can be finicky as allot of your management/helper programs are not there by default. You will have to either manage configurations by hand or install the needed programs to do those things.
Keep in mind that Alpine is supposed to be a minimal development environment so it is not actually meant to be used as a desktop environment. You can still do that, but the maintainers never intended for it to be a desktop distro.
@caprica You have some mighty fine recommendations in here. I would recommend sticking with what you know if this is going to be a critical system. But you are willing to learn along the way then switching to a different stable distro is worth the challenge. You will find that outside of the package managers, Linux is Linux, and Ubuntu is Ubuntu is insane. /s
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Dont look for a distro look for a DE
If you are asking for minimalism just run arch linux and the lightweight DE of your choice.
If you are asking for a standard set of tools included on the big distros. Take your pick Fedora or Ubuntu … XFCE i find to be lightweight but balaned. MATE is also an option
Otherwise distro doesnt effect much
ITS ALL JUST A KERNEL AND THE SAME TOOLS
Also servers dont utilize x window or wayland gui. Those pose a security risk as well as being needless overhead.
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I did go ahead and put Debian 10 stable “buster” with Xfce on it. When it comes to DE I think I’d be fine with anything that’s officially available via the installer when it comes to Debian, at least from a reliability standpoint and I probably should have mentioned that the laptop was a ThinkPad from ~2011 (i5-2520M, 8 GB) so I don’t think it would bottleneck on any of them.
For anyone taking this route with a laptop you will probably want this wifi-package.
I also have to admit that I hastily made my way to https://www.xfce-look.org/ and worth noting when using Xfce on the stable branch of Debian is that you get 4.12.x (pre-GTK3), probably easy to replace but might require more maintenance.
You wanna do it neon strippo use void lol
That wouldn’t be something like a T430? I have one that has an i5-2520 in it as well. I run Debian on it, and it’s great(Disclaimer: btw i use debian).
(any distro probably would run fine, the CPU isn’t really that slow and the Intel iGPU is good enough for an accelerated desktop.)
If you’re security focused, you might also want to install coreboot. coreboot has great security features(unlike the default BIOS), and also boots quicker. It’s actually the reason I bought a T430 in 2019.
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Too much hands-on, it’s fun to tinker but both my Arch and Manjaro installs succumb to some, most often update related error sooner or later that breaks the DE or some other component.
T420s, I heard about coreboot on these but so far only used it on my apu-boards. Would probably require a re-install after I went with UEFI. Is the security in coreboot from the transparency/openness or some from some other feature?
Well, it has a lot of security features(Besides being open-source, which is also a security feature!). It really depends on your threat model though.
You won’t be able to give your laptop to law enforcement and use it afterwards. Ever. But maybe you can loose it without worrying about data leaks.
For example, it allows embedding a small Linux inside the SPI flash for the BIOS that takes the role of GRUB via kexec(Kind of like a UEFI PEI). This has the advantage that you can use common & well-tested tools to attest your boot(For example GPG, see also: https://github.com/osresearch/heads), and that you don’t have an unencrypted bootloader on the harddisk. (Keep in mind that everyone who could swap you HDD could also reflash your SPI flash though).
It also allows disabling the Intel ME(you want this, even without coreboot), and replaces a whole lot of binary blobs(depends on hardware).
It also supports common things like TPM.
Edit: shouldn’t require a reinstall(For either legacy or UEFI boot).
Edit: Good read: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/tamper-evident-boot-heads, https://trmm.net/Heads_threat_model
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I rarely had this occur as long as you updated once a week and stayed close to upstream its fine. Delay longer and yeah things break.
I just love those old ThinkPads. I’ve got a X230 and a couple of T440p’s, but my favorite is a T420 which has been modded with an Ivy Bridge CPU and Coreboot.
The T420 boots in 2.5 seconds, while it takes the T440p (with OEM BIOS) at least a full minute. Plus there is no more Management Engine, nor UEFI cruft. It has plenty of power for any DE, but with an IGPU, it’s not much of a gamer. Still, I love this machine!
If you have 8GB of ram and a SSD, the Sandy Bridge ThinkPads are still relevant, but the IGPU of the Ivy Bridge CPU’s are significantly more powerful. Choose any DE that you like with confidence.
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Yes, the newer iGPU is definitly worth it. They support OpenCL!
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I you dont want to pay money for nice things then CentOS, if you do then RHEL
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