Dug my old laptop out (HP G60, Turion X2 64) - and installed Mint XFCE on it - so far it’s useable, but of course still slow. I’m amazed it works as well as it does (3 GB ram and an SSD). The CPU usage is at 100% a lot of the time.
My question is, what distros do you guys like for this age of laptop? This is a spare so more for messing around. I was thinking of trying Arch as I’ve hard it’s somewhat lightweight but not sure. I’ve really only used Debian since I’ve been on linux.
I’d bet that arch is a good choice. It’s really lightweight, and great for learning about the console, managing packages, etc.
Also, arch is way less intimidating than its reputation suggests; especially on a secondary PC, where you can just run off to your main PC to look at the arch wiki.
Other than that, I suppose something like AntiX would probably run not-terrible on it as well.
It’s only light if you configure it to be. It can be as heavy or as light as you want it to be, but it’s a good place to learn and experiment, as it’s comparatively trivial to switch stuff around. Arch wiki is probably the best Linux resource out there.