15 Years Old - MX Linux 18.3 - Can you believe it?
 

Hi everyone. Just wanted to share this ...A friend of mine gave me an old Medion laptop from 2004, with 75GB pre-SATA drive and 512MB of Ram. The CDRW was an old 4x clunker.

I have my own customized 32bit version of MX Linux 18.3 which is all decked out with the best 32bit applications, 32bit browsers, and so on. None of the heavy stuff of course, like Openshot or Gimp 2.10 ...

It wouldn't boot from USB no matter how I tried, so I made a 32bit copy on a DVD disk. I could only get it to install in NOPAE mode. Well, it took about two hours, but eventually 32bit MX Linux 18.3 was installed on that 15 year old computer, looking good and not too shabby on performance. All custom menus, help files, and interpretations intact/working. Then I installed LibreOffice 32bit, figuring that with only 512MB of RAM the system would more than likely crash or freeze up on me ... but no ... even LibreOffice had LibreWriter working decently.
Good thing that I installed a 4GB SWAP partition, eh? ;)

Found myself 2GB of RAM online for 10 Euros. I'll get that installed and then I'll goof around some more with Gimp on it. Wow, hard to believe that MX 18.3 is running on that 15 year old laptop. MX rulez !!!
I wonder how long it'll accept updates before the laptop finally gives up?
(rhetorical question)

Nice!

Also, antiX is likely to work on it with a bit of swap space too. :)

I regularly use a 2008 Toshiba Satellite, running from a 16GB SDHC card, but I do have 2GB ram on it. ;)

Well, my goal in life has become switching Winblows users over to Linux and I've used Mint for that for a long time. But eventually the flexibility of MX which I've been using for a number of years was so great for customizing more helpful versions of XFCE with far better app descriptions etc., that eventually I decided to make a custom version of MX as opposed to Mint. On newer computers with SSD drives and 6GB or more of RAM I'm still partial to installing Mint / Cinnamon since that's a very very attractive setup. It's just so much harder to customize some things in the German language.
IMO, 32bit MX Linux just rocks like nothing else on old stuff.
I'm not sure how good antiX would be for new & inexperienced users ...
Since I also set machines up for seniors, I try to keep the terminal out of their lives ... ;)

Yes, I tend to install MX on the computers that I recycle too. :)