Anyone know minimum requirements to run Ubuntu. The main flavor as well as any other you want to share. Also, suggest any other distrio for a 15 year old laptop. Thanks.
With Ubuntu, the laptop should be very slow. If 32-bit is required, Linux Mint is also available as an LMDE version with 32-bit: https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php If speed is particularly important, I would recommend Q4OS with TDE: https://q4os.org/ Sparky, MX or Raspberry Pi Desktop would also be an option. Crunchbang++ and Bunsenlabs are also very nice (and very dark). I had once tested some slim distributions here (article in German): https://gnulinux.ch/aktuelle-linux-distributionen-32-bit
It would be useful to share hardware specs so that we can really recommend something for it. You will get best results by trying out multiple distributions and get a feel. Generally, almost any linux will do, problem will be browser so saving as much ram for it would be useful.
First suggestion: get some used SSD for it if it does not have it already (even 64GB will do), second get more RAM if possible.
Depending on the user I would first go with Linux Mint XFCE, that is lightest easy to use distro I have found.
For someone more advanced/less expectations Crunchbang++ is very light.
Generally, almost any linux will do
That really depends on the hardware. A year or two ago a friend asked me to install Linux on his ancient laptop. If I remember correctly it has x86 BIOS and CPU, or a x86 bios and x86_64 CPU.
In any case, it had a hardware combination that made it next to impossible to find a distro that supports it. I tried a few Debian derivatives, arch, void, maybe fedora, and some distros I found in top 10 distro lists for old PCs. The only one that I got to both install and boot was Bodhi Linux. Never heard about it before or after, and it gave up on updating like half a year later.
sounds like some of those asus transformer devices :D
in that case your problem isn’t so much finding a distro to support that PC, but getting ANY distro to boot on it. It’s possible and takes pretty much the same steps for any distro - it’s just a horrible task for all cases.