50MB operating system can resurrect your old PC

42 pointsposted 14 hours ago
by makerdiety
(makeuseof.com)

19 Comments

wildzzz

10 hours ago

Unless your PC is older than like twenty years, there's absolutely no reason you must use DSL or any distro that includes pre-x86_64 support. Gnome3 might be a little heavy on super crappy hardware but anything that comes prepackaged with XFCE is perfect for an older PC (Xubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, etc).

iamnothere

9 hours ago

Tiny Core requires less than 50 MB of RAM and a 486. I like DSL but I’ve come to appreciate Tiny Core more. If you have a use case for an extremely light Linux system I recommend it. (I like it for single app GUI VMs.)

nicfio

3 hours ago

Agreed, Tiny Core Linux is made exactly to run on old and low-powered PCs. But you can think of a more radical solution: take inspiration from Tiny Core and, using frontier LLMs, build your own tiny and personal Linux. With this solution expect a long work, but in the end you will have a system designed for you, that fits your needs perfectly.

asveikau

10 hours ago

A decade old PC didn't come with Windows 7, which shipped 17 years ago. It would have windows 10, which shipped 11 years ago, or conceivably 8.1 but I would doubt it. 4gb ram is also too small for that era.

Beijinger

12 hours ago

Bodhi Linux may be a better idea: https://www.bodhilinux.com/

Not sure if it will get more updates in the future.

I may consider this for the future: https://github.com/JeffHoogland/moksha

UncleSlacky

11 hours ago

Or go straight to the distro DSL was forked from - antiX, which has a Debian Trixie-based 32-bit ISO (as well as the expected 64-bit version):

https://antixlinux.com/download/

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

dmuth

12 hours ago

I literally saw this in the first paragraph of the website and it feels like it was written with AI:

> It’s more than just software—it’s a statement.

I know us engineers aren't the best writers, but when I see things like this, it feels like they're not even trying to write their own content.

Beijinger

11 hours ago

I don't know who wrote this, but it is unlikely AI wrote it.

The main guy is an older engineer with a lot of health struggles. And yes, he is American. Born American as far as I can tell. His health was once so bad, he asked for private donations. Unfortunately, I was not aware of it at that time; otherwise I would have posted it to HN.

anthk

42 minutes ago

4GB, old? With 4GB of RAM and ZRAM Alpine with a light DE will fly, and any modern browser with UBlock Origin will open most web sites like nothing.

Imustaskforhelp

3 hours ago

I also recommend tinycorelinux (TCL) if you want even more minimalism: http://tinycorelinux.net/

I personally once used this where it simply only had pdf ability and not a browser or anything else and I have used TCL to resurrect one of my older pc's into making it just work and I can even install many applications. This is a 12-15 year old Dell inspiron mini with 1gb ram. I also love its aesthetics so much and it is so cute when it runs TCL and I sort of used it as a second monitor to run pomodorokitty for sometime as well (all thanks to TCL!)

I really really love TCL so much, the smallest version is 17mb, I highly recommend giving it a try if you have free time, I feel as if people can really appreciate the intentional minimalism within the project :-D

dist-epoch

11 hours ago

I'm running Windows 10 on a 18 year old PC (2008 Intel Q9300, 8 GB RAM)

It works for browsing the web and various non-intensive apps.

crusty

13 hours ago

Core i, 4GB RAM is old? Naw dawg.

derwiki

11 hours ago

In my day, we used a boot disk to restart without Windows 95 so we could run Doom with 8mb RAM