
Some years ago I put Puppy Linux on a PC. This was supposed to be lean and quick — therefore good on old computers, and easy to install and use.
I found it to be none of these: it took three days to work out how to install it, it was slower than Windows 98se (I said it was a long time ago) and was FAR from easy to use.
In 2015 I was playing about with an old lap-top which had a messed-up installation of Vista on. I was struggling to sort it out so I installed Linux Mint on it as if that didn’t work I’d know it had hardware problems and wasn’t worth messing about with. Not only did it work but I found I liked it. I’d been dyed-in-the-wool DOS/Windows for nearly thirty years so if I can take to it anybody can.
Linux has a serious image problem. It seems to be the operating system of choice for hairy geeks, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy nuts, trolls and various other fruit-cakes. It is true that a lot of people use it for reasons that are philosophical rather than technical and it is possible to mess about ‘under the bonnet’ with it to a higher degree than Windows, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
Linux can be confusing as there are so many versions of it available. At least they are free to download (legally) and will run off a DVD or USB device so you can test them out before permanently installing them. This isn’t a fully fair test as they’ll be much slower when having to read off a DVD than they would be when reading from a hard disk. This is also useful if your Windows computer won’t boot for some reason as booting it from a Linux DVD will, hopefully, enable you to rescue files from it and at least get on-line to Google how to fix it. Linux can also be easily set-up so that you can boot your computer into either that or Windows. Linux will be able to access your Windows files, providing you fully closed Windows previously, but Windows won’t understand the Linux ones.
The most widely used version is Ubuntu Linux, of which Mint is a derivative aimed at ‘Normal’ people. This means that there’s plenty of information available, though that is a mixed blessing as a lot of it is old and may or may not still be relevant.
There are several versions aimed at old computers. If you’ve got a PC that would run Windows XP it’ll have far more chance of running a lightweight variety of Linux than Windows 10, and it won’t cost you anything. Linux does seem to make more efficient use of the available hardware and I’ve found that Debian (which makes no claims to be lightweight) runs quicker on computers that were made in the XP era than XP itself did.
It is also possible to run Windows programs under Linux using a program called Wine. This doesn’t claim to run every Windows program perfectly but probably does a better job than newer versions of Windows does with programs written for older versions.
DOS programs can be run under either DOSBox or one of its derivatives.
Out of curiosity I also tried Lubuntu Linux (another member of the Ubuntu family) and didn’t like that AT ALL. The moral of the story is: if you try Linux and don’t like it, try another version instead of writing the whole idea off.
Some time later I got an old Raspberry Pi and was impressed by how well it ran given how primitive it is — it’s got nowhere near the power of modern Pi’s and I read somewhere that it’s roughly equivalent to a Pentium II. This runs Raspian which is based on Debian, as is Ubuntu. I therefore tried the desktop version on the same old lap-top I’d first put Mint on and it was as night and day. It went from being OK for the basics to absolutely fine for the basics and OK for the more demanding tasks it had been incapable of with Mint.
It wasn’t wholly a success though as the Desktop Environment is ‘basic’ to the point of being of very little use. I could have up-graded that to Mate but as I also wanted rid of all the Pi-specific stuff I thought I’d give straight Debian a try before going to that trouble. This was just as good as Raspian in terms of speed but sophisticated enough to be easy to use.
Not long after that my main laptop finally expired and the new one had Windows 10 on. I didn’t like that at all — not only does it look horrible but the changes made left me feeling more lost then when I first used Linux. I therefore changed it to Debian. It’s strange but modern Linux is more like ‘classic’ Windows than modern Windows is.
I would still recommend anybody with no Linux experience starts off with the Mate edition of Mint as there is more information available for the Ubuntu family. There’s not much about Debian apart from it’s voluminous official documentation, which is pretty useless and often out-of-date. It does have a User Forum but this is full of trolls who will give ‘helpful’ answers to questions like “Find out,” or “Google it.”
I found it to be none of these: it took three days to work out how to install it, it was slower than Windows 98se (I said it was a long time ago) and was FAR from easy to use.
In 2015 I was playing about with an old lap-top which had a messed-up installation of Vista on. I was struggling to sort it out so I installed Linux Mint on it as if that didn’t work I’d know it had hardware problems and wasn’t worth messing about with. Not only did it work but I found I liked it. I’d been dyed-in-the-wool DOS/Windows for nearly thirty years so if I can take to it anybody can.
Linux has a serious image problem. It seems to be the operating system of choice for hairy geeks, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy nuts, trolls and various other fruit-cakes. It is true that a lot of people use it for reasons that are philosophical rather than technical and it is possible to mess about ‘under the bonnet’ with it to a higher degree than Windows, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
Linux can be confusing as there are so many versions of it available. At least they are free to download (legally) and will run off a DVD or USB device so you can test them out before permanently installing them. This isn’t a fully fair test as they’ll be much slower when having to read off a DVD than they would be when reading from a hard disk. This is also useful if your Windows computer won’t boot for some reason as booting it from a Linux DVD will, hopefully, enable you to rescue files from it and at least get on-line to Google how to fix it. Linux can also be easily set-up so that you can boot your computer into either that or Windows. Linux will be able to access your Windows files, providing you fully closed Windows previously, but Windows won’t understand the Linux ones.
The most widely used version is Ubuntu Linux, of which Mint is a derivative aimed at ‘Normal’ people. This means that there’s plenty of information available, though that is a mixed blessing as a lot of it is old and may or may not still be relevant.
There are several versions aimed at old computers. If you’ve got a PC that would run Windows XP it’ll have far more chance of running a lightweight variety of Linux than Windows 10, and it won’t cost you anything. Linux does seem to make more efficient use of the available hardware and I’ve found that Debian (which makes no claims to be lightweight) runs quicker on computers that were made in the XP era than XP itself did.
It is also possible to run Windows programs under Linux using a program called Wine. This doesn’t claim to run every Windows program perfectly but probably does a better job than newer versions of Windows does with programs written for older versions.
DOS programs can be run under either DOSBox or one of its derivatives.
Out of curiosity I also tried Lubuntu Linux (another member of the Ubuntu family) and didn’t like that AT ALL. The moral of the story is: if you try Linux and don’t like it, try another version instead of writing the whole idea off.
Some time later I got an old Raspberry Pi and was impressed by how well it ran given how primitive it is — it’s got nowhere near the power of modern Pi’s and I read somewhere that it’s roughly equivalent to a Pentium II. This runs Raspian which is based on Debian, as is Ubuntu. I therefore tried the desktop version on the same old lap-top I’d first put Mint on and it was as night and day. It went from being OK for the basics to absolutely fine for the basics and OK for the more demanding tasks it had been incapable of with Mint.
It wasn’t wholly a success though as the Desktop Environment is ‘basic’ to the point of being of very little use. I could have up-graded that to Mate but as I also wanted rid of all the Pi-specific stuff I thought I’d give straight Debian a try before going to that trouble. This was just as good as Raspian in terms of speed but sophisticated enough to be easy to use.
Not long after that my main laptop finally expired and the new one had Windows 10 on. I didn’t like that at all — not only does it look horrible but the changes made left me feeling more lost then when I first used Linux. I therefore changed it to Debian. It’s strange but modern Linux is more like ‘classic’ Windows than modern Windows is.
I would still recommend anybody with no Linux experience starts off with the Mate edition of Mint as there is more information available for the Ubuntu family. There’s not much about Debian apart from it’s voluminous official documentation, which is pretty useless and often out-of-date. It does have a User Forum but this is full of trolls who will give ‘helpful’ answers to questions like “Find out,” or “Google it.”