Hey guys so I have pretty much no experience with Linux except for using Ubuntu a couple times but I've heard that certain distros are insanely light and don't require great hardware to run smoothly. So I've been thinking about putting Linux on my gf's 8-year old HP dv2700 laptop since it's insanely slow and dated. At first she was against it because as an iPhone owner, she needs iTunes and knows that Linux doesn't natively support it. However, I've read that its possible to run iTunes on Linux using Wine so she's now open to the idea. Anyway, my question is would it even be a good idea to put Linux on her laptop? And if so, based on her hardware, which would be the fastest Linux distro for her? All she does on her PC is manage a small photo and music library and watch YouTube.
Her laptop:
-Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 @ 1.66 Ghz
-3GB ram
-160GB hdd
-currently has Windows Vista 32-bit installed
P.S. Please no purchase suggestions. I've thought about putting in an SSD but can't justify spending $60 upgrading a laptop worth less than double that. I think if there's gonna be any money spent, I'd rather sell the laptop for what I can on ebay and put the money towards a Chromebook.
you have plenty of ram for any distro. i would try porteus with each desktop and see which one she likes. porteus is meant to literally live on a flash drive, so you dont have to install it to try it. being that the OS is super small, you can use more of the HD for music.
That laptop is still golden, with some simple optimization tweaks you can easily put some newer systems to shame even. I'm rocking a netbook from 2008 with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo myself, and there's no reason for me to upgrade yet.
Anything you wish my friend, there good specs for Linux, an SSD would be a nice upgrade also for Linux, I would recommend Manjaro just because of the hardware detection system, and the fact its stable up to date and very fast, if not, I am hearing good things about Neptune OS
I haven't tried iTunes on Linux for a while, but a few years ago I could not get it to sync with a usb device. Supposedly there were Linux alternatives that would allow you to sync with Apple devices, but I was not proficient enough to get them to work. Unless it has become dramatically easier, I would not expect someone totally unfamiliar with Linux to try and live with that every day. Perhaps if you jailbreak her iPhone you can just drag and drop music files on it like an android phone, then you could make Linux work for her.
Yeah, pretty much any relatively lightweight distro would work fine on that hardware, and for what she does. And a quick google search shows that itunes run through WINE should work perfectly well. Since she is a linux newb and is coming from Vista, I'd suggest a distro that uses the lxde environment. It's lightweight, and is very reminiscent of the windows taskbar/start menu interface, so may be less intimidating for her to transition to. Lubuntu is probably the most popular, but there's also Linux Mint LXDE, OpenSUSE Factory, Debian etc.
Download a few and try them out. See what you (and she) prefer.
Hi I have a Thinkpad T500 with a Intel Core2 Duo and 2GB ram that I use Linux with my favorite distros that work the best on this laptop are crunchbang.org/download/ and linuxmint.com/ with XFCE desktop Crunchbang will give the best performance I get smooth 720p playback on Youtube but it is a base and very minimal it comes with Openbox desktop but you can change it to XFCE witch will give you windows like feel. Try an older version of Linuxmint if it feels too slow if you don't like those try Ubuntu 10.10.
i have a dell inspiron 1501 with lubuntu and it runs great! all the ease of ubuntu backend with no bloat. it even does steam in home streaming from my main windows pc so i can game in bed. pretty smooth the network card suck though so i have to keep it plugged in for steam but otherwise no problems.