I have an old Toshiba Satellite A40-151, and a couple of old MACs - one an iBook G4, and the other a Powerbook G4. I am looking to move away from Windows in particular and want to know what Distro/Distros would be recommended for this/these machines. I also have a version of Linux Mint (Cinnamon) 17.3 installed on a VMWare virtual drive on a 2013 MAC running osSierra (not High Sierra.)

Ta.

Hi Vinchenzo,

I'm not an Apple guy - so I'll leave the MAC parts of your question to others.

For the Toshiba Satellite, there are probably several viable linux alternatives. It will depend on the hardware - if you can give us a few specs, it will be easier for members to offer opinions. Most important details:

- amount of RAM
- amount of disk space
- CPU class and speed
- make of graphics / display chip / adapter
- make of audio chip / adapter

... the rest is less crucial.

Cheers !

Linux works just fine with Mac and the same mentioned by Rickkkk should be taken into account when deciding whether to switch to it or not. Also when doing some research and looking for stats for my java homework I found these reviews and thoughts on combining Linux with Mac hardware from various users. Cheers

here's the link to those thoguhts and ideas infoworld.com/article/2956558/linux/should-you-install-linux-on-a-mac.html

Toshiba Satellite A40-151 specs

By searching the sentence above with Google, gives a link (first link to a .pdf at the top of the results), says it can run most all Linux if you can add ram memory, at 256MB ram, you are stuck with damn small Linux if it still exists. Yet there are many distributions that will run on that with lightweight desktop environments.
Visit the web page to any distribution and check out the minimum requirements. If it ran Windows XP, it can run a hundred or more Linux distributions. Use the search bar and type: minimum requirements

I'm running Debian testing with a heavyweight desktop (Plasma) on a 2005 machine that came with Windows XP, got some ram though.

Ironically, many people think that Linux on a laptop is something exotic and there must be a special distribution for laptops. In fact, the same distribution can be on the server, on the cluster, on the desktop, and on the laptop. Nevertheless, there are some special features in installing Linux on a laptop. While searching a topic for my link removed I found this discussion and I think it will be a very cool idea for my research paper. thanks

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CentOS 6.9 might install and be usable on 256 meg of ram
but Cent is not a great choice for a laptop

i do have it running on a desktop from 2000 / 2001 but there is 1 gig of ram in it

I recently installed Debian with LXDE on 2 32-bit laptops from 2003. It works great!

If your Toshiba has 256MB of RAM, all is not lost! You can run AntiX, WattOS, Lubuntu, and (just about) Bodhi. Lubuntu is also available for the PowerPC G4 architecture.