Suitability
How well do they perform on under-powered machines?
Despite being aimed at older machines, with fewer CPU and RAM resources than modern counterparts, many of the distributions have curious software selection. Several ship with Libreoffice, when perhaps the choice of Abiword and others would have made more sense in terms of memory footprint.
Emmabuntüs provides the same core set of applications across its 64-bit and 32-bit editions. This includes an assortment of applications for everyday use as well as for hobbyists. While the selection isn’t necessarily sensitive to low-resource systems, the distribution aims to make up for it by its choice of desktop environment. The Xfce desktop environment is far more lightweight than peers such as KDE and Gnome.
Q4OS and Feren OS both take between 15-20 seconds to launch any application, whether its Libreoffice or a web browser. Thankfully, there’s no sluggishness while working with any of the applications. While Q4OS defaults to the Trinity desktop environment, a fork of KDE, Feren OS ships with Cinnamon.
Sparkylinux produces two images featuring LXQT and Xfce. We tried the LXQT variant and found it to be the fastest of the lot in application launch times. The performance was also quite smooth throughout. If you’re willing to sacrifice some eye candy for performance, Sparkylinux just might be right fit for you.
Like Emmabuntüs, Void Linux too ships with XFCE, but the two distros are very distinct. Not only does Void Linux lack the eye candy of Emmabuntüs, it also offers a minimal number of applications. There’s no office applications on offer, for instance.