A friend of someone related doesn’t have a laptop nowadays, but needs one. Now we have 2 old laptops at home, and we want to give her one so she can do some things on it. Since she isn’t used to laptops and the old laptops wouldn’t run a Windows 11 (I don’t want to install a Win10 because of end of support and lacking security features), I guess installing a simple Linux is fine. Now comes the big question: Which Linux distro should I install? (see requirements below)
Laptops:
- Acer Aspire ES 15, AMD dual-core E1-7010 @1.5 GHz, 4GB RAM, 1000 GB HDD
- HP Pavilion 17-e030ez, Intel Pentium @2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM, 10000 GB HDD (I’d choose this)
Tasks:
- Office Stuff (I thought about OnlyOffice)
- Internet surfing
- Banking via Web
Requirements:
- needs to have full German support
- needs an easy software installation center
- should be easy to learn
- optionally, her friends (which probably use Windows/ Mac) should be able to help her (since she never had a laptop before)
- eventually German forum/ German Guides
I’m using Linux/ Manjaro for myself but don’t have any experience with beginner-friendly distros. I used a KDE neon for some time and also have used Ubuntu, and to be honest, they seem beginner-friendly too.
Please let me know your opinions, thanks!
Regarding Specs, I’d choose a lite DE.
- Xubuntu
- Linux Mint with Mate or Xfce
You can even use an LTS version for longer lasting editions.
Linux in general has good language support.
I’ve yet to find a distro with NZ English 😆. I’d love to just start a new dictionary and add words to it for all the spell checks, but I’ve never worked out how to do this. I’m not sure there’s even system level spell check.
There are lots of choices, but personally I would go with Linux Mint as something likely familiar and packaged with pretty much all the basics for the use case you outlined.
That’s a pretty weak machine. Linux Mint is my #1 recommendation for new Linux users, especially former Windows users. It’s what I moved my parents to on their very old computer and it works great.
Try the default Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop first, but if it seems really slow, go with the XFCE version.
You really need to use an SSD in that laptop if possible, it will speed things up to a usable level. Also, if the RAM is upgradable, you should put 8GB minimum in it. DDR3 laptop sticks are dirt cheap, you can get them online for $20-$30 for 8GB sticks.
Same with SSDs, get a 1000GB brand new SSD for $50-$60, it will make everything much more responsive.
Yeah, it’s an old laptop. She doesn’t have much money for a new laptop and since she won’t use it often, it’s enough to check mail, e-banking, … And we have some old laptops at home nobody uses, so we thought we could give it to her as a gift.
Eventually, she’ll buy a new ~400$ laptop later with some good specs but that’s not in the next few months. But thanks for the tips.
On my living room setup hooked up to a projector:
mint xfce
sff tower
dual core
only 3GB ddr2. (One slot fried)
1080p via display port to HDMI
1tb HDD
Use 2 VPN. An sshd server
Myriad physical issues.
Old as fuck BIOS.
(Was released in 2009 or 2011?)
Memory is a bit of a pain sometimes. Mostly Firefox needs to be closed and reopened after system sleep.
I can watch 4 football games in HD with no real issue.
It is tweaked to high heaven in kernal and configs.
As long as it can work I will make it work.
Anything will be fine. I’d try a xfce/lxqt desktop, but even on old dual cores the newest kde is good.
Everyone says mint, but suse has a huge German community because it’s from Germany.
Another person said you should upgrade to ssd and maybe add more ram, and I agree with them. Usually I spend $40 to do that to laptops and it makes real dogs run great.
Post the model numbers on the bottom of the laptops and I can give some pre-gifting upgrade advice with actionable links. Both seem to take 2.5” sata ssds so that’s good and cheap, but there’s different models of the aspire es-15 which take different memory sizes.
If you do take the cheap ssd replacement route, give them one of those usb hdd enclosures with the old big rotational hdd in there. They’re like seven bucks and it means they have a place to hold a backup of their data if the gift laptop dies.
Linux Mint for sure.
It’s more welcoming to newbies than even Windows.
