Lightweight distros The Verdict
The right choice for the perfect distro for old hardware depends on the age of the computer and its numbercrunching capabilities. For instance, Q4OS loses out for being the heaviest of the lot in terms of the resources it needs for an enjoyable experience. The fact that it doesn’t bundle a whole lot of apps right out of the box, as do some of the others, doesn’t help matters. But it’s good for speeding up hardware that’s sluggish with the latest releases of your favourite distro that wouldn’t be any better on older machines.
Bunsenlabs also loses out for pretty much the same reasons as Q4OS. It’s not as lightweight as the others in the Roundup and doesn’t ship with very many apps either. The script to add more apps with a single click doesn’t offer enough flexibility, and is perhaps better avoided on machines with limited resources since it’ll take up a considerable amount of time installing a bunch of apps that you might not even need.
If making an outdated machine useful again was the only criteria, Tiny Core would have come out on top. But if, like the rest of us, you care about some degree of usability as well, the distro slips down a couple of steps on the podium. It’s the lightest of the lot, but not the easiest to operate, nor is it the prettiest of the lot.
It’s a close call between Bionicpup and antix. Both ship with miniscule window managers that their developers have tuned for form and function. They are both based on solid distros with a large repository of useful apps. Personally, though, we’ll use antix over Bionicpup to resuscitate the machines in our attic. We can find fault with some of antix’s choice of default apps – Libreoffice would just hog all the memory of many computers with little RAM – but the distro is one of the easiest to customise.
Its home-brewed control centre app makes it fairly easy to administer, and we’re also fond of its snapshot app to roll installations into installable ISOS. The fact that antix has fewer esoteric apps as compared to Bionicpup, which bundles quite a few of its own custom apps, also helped turn the scales in favour of antix.