I have Zorin OS Lite on an old laptop. I like Zorin for many reasons such as its clean and professional layout. The hardware is too weak for the distro as it is quite slow. Any good lighter distros?

Here is the hardware:

• Intel Celeron dual-core processor T1400
• 160 GB HDD
• 2 GB DDR2

AntiX and MX Linux come to mind.

it was already discussed several times here, on LQ and the usual answer was antix.

I have tried both before (MX for sure). I don't like them, unfortunately. If my memory serves me correctly, I didn't like the installation process.

Puppy, SaliX, Slackel. I'd suggest slackware except for your installer statement. Then there is light slackware that dude built for his daughter. I can never remember the name.

I have tried Slackware before. The installation experience certainly was far different from Linux Mint, Zorin, and Deepin.

Then what you are looking for was not the "lighter than Zorin" that you asked for.
TinyCore and Puppy are very light, but probably not what you want.
If you provide your real requirements, we might be able to make some more directed suggestions.

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If internet browsing is the problem, no distro will magically speed up an old computer, modern day web browsers are just too big & have heavy use of ram.

Might like to check out MenuetOS, KolibriOS, HaikuOS, or even FreeDOS, all very lightweight, but not Linux.

Antix, Slitaz, TinyCore are the most efficient of the Linux distros for old equipment.

How many times do you have to install? If you can't face their easy installer, never try Fedora, let alone Arch!

vw98008,

These links give you a better idea of what superlight Puppy looks like:

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/...onicpup-8.html

https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/

There is no need to install Puppy to your PC or laptop. Just run it from a USB drive:

https://linuxhint.com/install-puppy-linux-usb/

Thanks anyone for your input.

After walking through all the suggested distros, I decided to try out Salix. I got it installed with two tries and it runs more responsively than Zorin. I guess that the performance won't get much better with other distros and any Debian-based distros will take more resources.

Bodhi Linux or LXLE may be worth looking into.

vw98008,

Your spec suggests you have something like a Dell Inspiron 1525.

A different distro will only make a minor difference.

The quickest way (if possible) to boost performance is to replace the HDD with a SSD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtmDw_1hMRA

Of course, this may not be economically viable on such an old machine, but it would definitely transform its behaviour.

You might also try Alpine or a derivative. It runs very few default processes and is almost as lean as OpenBSD in that regard.

Dropping the desktop environment and running a plain window manager will help a small amount too. There are a lot to choose from and some are quite lean, but that comes at the cost of being less obvious to figure out how to customize. A case in point would be plain FVWM versus FVWM-Crystal.

However, most of the performance problems are going to come from the desktop applications themselves and those won't really vary across distros or, for that matter, operating systems. For example browsers are among the worst, but if you deviate from Chromium (and derivatives) or Firefox then you start to run into site compatibility problems due to wasteful, incompatible javascript and sites that are really web "apps" and not actual sites.

TRUE THAT! I spent $20 on a 128GB SSD for my Pentium 4 a year or so ago, and suddenly it seems fast like a modern pc! (I was previously using the original 40GB IDE drive). I'd say it's economically viable on any PC you're still using a spinning disk on.

Nowadays you can get 1TB SSD for ~50USD. This is the absolute best upgrade you can do to your PC, you'll notice it immediately in boot times and app loading times being way way faster. And if you're using up your memory and using swap, it'll restore tabs from swap much faster.