I've been asked to get an oldish laptop, an ASUS X53U-SX047V with 4G of RAM to be usable again as a browsing machine as Win7 on it was way to slow.
They asked me to do a 'browsing pc' and I've tried lots of distros.
Just now I installed 'BionicPup64 8.0' and it seems to work OK.

Just for fun I also tried to install some games, like 0AD, OpenAreana or such games, but nope.
Installing just 0AD, didn't work but as I installed libraries, don't know which, I just installed all, this game started. OpenArena won't start though. I can get into it, set like single mode, skirmish but then it just quits.
Even Steam on this laptop didn't work, might be 'cos it's PuppyLinux I don't know, but then again, why didn't those missing dependencies get installed when I installed Steam as it was an 'easy' install thru "quickpet".

...all this leads to my real question:
Is there a distro, lightweight or not that DO make these games work without putting hours and hours into it? I've tried for YEARS and still nothing. I have to put like 5-20 hours into just one game to get it to work. Well, if it's more advanced like 0AD or OpenArena.

I'm thinking of getting some extra disks into an older machine, one set with Linux and the other with the crappy Win-OS and that I before turning the PC on, switch which OS/(disk to use, not DualBooting) I want to use.
But I SO wanna play those "bigger" games like 0AD, OpenArena, and some of those Quake-clones, but I have still not after months and months not found a distro that I can use to install these games and play, at least with ease.

Either it's the distro, which I don't think or it's me...
I thought that if I install the game ALL!!! dependencies will be installed, but nope.
I have to google, fiddle, test, crash, burn and give up.

What is wrong with me??

Info of my 'older machine' is in the pictures.

Attached Thumbnails

       

What other distros have you tried to do this on? Just Puppy?

on this older laptop not much.
On this workstation or what ever you may call it, some...
Fedora, Ubuntu... well plenty, mostly derivatives from Ubuntu since that seems to be the most out there... Mint, Elementary, Peppermint

Did it do the same in other distros?

You may find this article helpful: https://itsfoss.com/linux-gaming-distributions/

I like the Sparky Linux Gameover edition. You may want to read up on it before giving it a try.

More light reading for the gaming set. https://linuxhint.com/best_linux_distributions_gaming/
Many major distributions (Debian and direct offspring, children of Ubuntu for example) have many native games in the repos. Some DE (Desktop Environments) including KDE and Gnome have sets of games specifically compiled to work with that environment.

There is no shortage of games for Linux, but some kinds of games are more rare, What kind of games are you looking to play on this platform?


One heads up: games that require massive processing or an advanced GPU (or both) are going to be a problem due to the hardware limitations no matter WHAT distribution you load.

Exactly, recent games have higher hardware requirements than the most bloated DEs.

Have you seen this?
https://www.recalbox.com/

this too
https://retropie.org.uk/

I like MX, Void, and antiX for lightweight distros. Two of those are debian based so you should have a decent sized repo. I'm not into gaming but for a fast distro on an older pc it's hard to beat these.

I tend to game on debian stable. But once you start adding "games" it's hardly lightweight. There's lots of games already in most distros. And others available with flatpak, snaps, and other options.

# apt-get install armagetronad bzflag torcs bsdgames extremetuxracer

And many many more.

Sorry it's been a while on this post.

I tried every distros I already named 2 times now and there are issues, on some the network just stops working or do net even start, some other cant even install some games, some has audio issues.

Anywho... I just took a step into a totally unknown area, and as I've understood it, hard to install distro, Arch.
Took me 4 times before I got it, the 3 first time was that I didn't start the install-USB WITH!!! UEFI and that made it unable at the installing of grub. Ah well, not know NOW

I can say THIS distro is VERY lightweight on this laptop, and I got 4 games installed all without a problem.
Some that I wanted to install had no packages for it for Arch so we'll see if I do anything manually later on that, Mod DB has some pretty neat mods for all kind of games.

So for know, thanks for everyone's help and such.


@wpeckham, Yep, tried that did some hours on trying to get network fixed but didn't wanted to put anymore time in it so Sparky is out.
@frankbell, Yep seen that plenty of time as I googled.
@wpeckham, I'll check these too but some of these I find are so "old" not maintained anymore.
@FlinchX, Yeah, I know, not that unknown to computers and what games need
@linus72, Not that much into retro stuff but I'll sure check it out
@Mill J, Both AntiX and MX had issues with audio and also here after some hours I didn't think it needed more attention so I quit that too, gotta check up on Void tho, can't say I recall that name.
@Shadow_7, I think I'm gonna try debian sometime, seems to get a lot of attention theses days. Also here, I know that it's the game puts pressure on the H/W so...
many distros, or as I've seen these weeks everyone, you can not remove or chose packages anymore BEFORE install. I mean, why do I want to install eg. Libre, just to remove it later. Is it an old H/W with just HDD it's gonna take time.
Remember "long" time ago with Fedora/RedHat/CentOS(and many more), you could at installation time chose exactly what packages you wanted. OK maybe not for all but it can't be that hard to let the people that want this be able to chose.


Anywho... I'm gonna mark this 'solved' even though this may go on for some more months :P

Also, when I can remove the old HDD's from the server, I'm gonna put them in my main machine and with switches turn on/off the disks before boot for either OS I got installed. Gonna be a cool project and on this one I sure gonna play some "heavy" Linux games

l8r all