In a strange position today. Already running Debian and Ubuntu on my main two laptops.
This past week, I won an auction for a lot of non-working ThinkPad T450s’s.
To my surprise, all three actually worked. They just needed hard drives and batteries. I had the SSDs, and for the price I paid for three laptops, I didn’t mind picking up a few inexpensive aftermarket batteries.
Now… what to do w/ 3 identical laptops all running 5th gen i5 CPUs and not a lot of RAM (2 have 12gb, one has 4gb). Seems obvious. Let’s run some lightweight distros and experiment with lighter window managers I haven’t played with. Maybe even a BSD on one?
What lightweight distros have you run or do you suggest?
I’ve never used a tiling window manager. Have used OpenBox in the past.
You could try a source-based distro, like LFS (Linux from scratch), Slackware or Funtoo (a Gentoo derivative). Building would take a fair while (I’ve build Funtoo on a Celeron way back when, that took several days. 1st gen Shuttle V50 all-in-one, with touchscreen. It still boots but I’d probably have to change the battery as it’s been offline for years!)
I’ve always wanted to try Slackware. That could be a nice weekend project. About to try ArchCraft on one of them now. And I caved and grabbed a RAM stick for the third one. May as well have them all matching.
So far, they aren’t what I’d call slow. Not gaming on them, so perfectly fine for anything else I’ll throw at them that isn’t hitting the newer laptops or desktop.
I have a Pinebook Pro, now unfortunately broken, which I ran for a while with Manjaro Sway. Nice distro but the colour schemes aren’t quite my cup of tea. In parallel, I was working on installing Void Linux on an SD card; that project stayed unfinished. I recommend you give it a try.
A new kid on the block is Chimera Linux, a custom approach with a BSD-derived userland. Quite interesting as well.
Finally, these ThinkPads should work excellently with FreeBSD and OpenBSD (I’m currently working on installing FreeBSD on my daily driver Dell Latitude 7490). Caveats: in FreeBSD the wifi will be noticeably slower than in Linux, while OpenBSD lacks a bluetooth stack.
I’d use Debian, but not select to install a desktop environment which tend to be quite large.
A base Debian install is pretty light, there’s not much going on, the kernel, systemd, a handful of other things. 12GB of RAM is a giant amount.
If you’re into experimenting and learning, OpenBSD is quite nice and has a lot of utility as a router / firewall / network appliance. I’ve been running it for years on a 4GB of RAM APU2, which last I looked was overkill for it’s memory usage.
Tiling windows managers are worth a look, i3 if you use X, sway if you use wayland, I’ve found very nice. Both are in Debian, and make for quite a lightweight environment.