just need a distro that is not too demanding on the hardware side and i mean light as possible because will be putting on a ancient laptop that has a C2D P8400
Try lubuntu, I put it on my girlfriends horrible single core atom netbook and it was like night and day compared to windows 7.
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I agree with @Dexter_Kane. There are more exotic options available, but lubuntu should be perfect for you.
acutally ubuntu mate is also super light.
i have seen that lubuntu is using sometimes even more ram, cpu than ubuntu mate.
Based on the title I wouldn't even consider Lubuntu, but something like Puppy and Arch if you feel that you could do that. Puppy Linux is double as light as Lubuntu, and Arch is as light as you make it.
A C2D isn't really in need of a super-light distro. You should get away with most distros that feature the Mate, LXDE, LxQT or XFCE Desktop. I'd recommend Debian with XFCE -> You can make it look really nice, has good software support, not to many background tasks, etc.Another recommendation would be to mount the drive with the noatime and relatime options: This prevents writes everytime a file is read(No Access times). BTW: The pentium's in our school run fine with Gnome 3(At least the fallback mode Kali is using). They're just low-clocked Dualcores as well.
If you want to go super-light as a challange, try DammSmallLinux. I used to run it just FFS on an P1 @~100 MHz and 32MB RAM on an ancient notebook using a boot floppy just fine.
If you really want to learn something on the way, use LinuxFromScratch: This is the real challange!
Any 'meta' distro will do. Like Arch Linux.
Any distro will work fine on a Core 2 Duo, don't worry about it, just install what you feel more comfortable with.
My personal suggestion: Manjaro with Xfce.
I put Xubuntu on c2d's hell even atoms, either way most distros will run just fine. Many people underestimate old duo cores.
I would not recommend lubuntu for a cpu that slow. Lubuntu only saves on gpu and not cou. dsl or puppylinux would be much better and much smoother.
Debian is super stable and insanely optimized/patched but I'm unsure about it being the lightest possible. Anything involving Ubuntu I can't vouch for because I know so little about it due to not liking it. Mint is a good choice; it's about as barebones as you can get without going Arch or Puppy. My personal favorite is OpenSUSE, because you can customize the desktop like mad without even getting into anything too nerdy. Because of that, it is a little top-heavy (still lighter than Win though).
A Core 2 Duo is ancient and needs an extremely light distro? Nah. You could get away with a lot with those.
I'm with @Xpander. Ubuntu MATE is a great option as it's Gnome 2 and as light as XFCE(if I remember correctly).
LXLE,lubuntu and Q4OS are lightweight! give em shot :D
Yeah because I'm running a Windows 7 64bit Ultimate (Borrowed) and its practically slow af. All I'm doing is beating my wang off and Facebook and Youtube and like 5 other tabs Google Chrome. It run with Chrome about %50 usage no youtube and Chrome has to compromised by the lack of ram by 'deleting' tabs that i have opened due to the lack of ram which is 3gbs btw which should be plenty. Also going to put this if i can on my dads crappy netbook since it has windows starter edition and idles around 100%. I have run antivirus by yanking that pos hdd and loosing a few screws in the process of the hard drive and running malwarebytes to have little detection rates. all he does is browse ebay and gumtree (craiglists if you are american). I may have overestimated this performance of this mobile processor to a certain point but.
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That's a HDD issue not an issue with the processor I think. I have a Core 2 Duo 2GHz in my Thinkpad and it runs great with it's SSD on Windows 8 (and it ran Ubuntu and 7 fine too). 3GB of RAM.
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You've got choices, C2D will do well with the following: (and several others not listed)
Full Desktop Distributions:
Mint - XFCE MATE
Lubuntu - LXDE
Fedora - XFCE LXDE
Tiny Distributions:
Puppy - About
Porteus - About
I'd personally recommend any of the Full Distributions. The tiny ones are really meant for occasional use, usually off a USB stick.
3 GB of ram and a Core 2 Duo is enough for any distro/DE.
If you want a comparison: Raspbian (Debian based distro) with LXDE works well on a Raspberry Pi 2 with an ARM processor and 1 GB of ram. Your laptop is a lot more powerful than that.
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I'm almost done a very thorough tutorial on arch Linux which will help you set everything up completely, start to finish
THANK YOU SO MUCH. was planning to use arch on the pos laptop and soon on my desktop as well this was just what i needed.
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It's big... Like I'm at 3.8 thousand words so far and i think it's probably going to go over 5. But it covers everything from installing org and configuring drivers to getting wine working and setting up pacman and powerpill
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