My wife has an old Lenovo i5 thinkpad that we would like to use again with linux, before buying a new computer. I was wondering if there is a tool that I can input the model and stats of the device and it will output a few suggested distros for it.
It is the X1 Carbon 20BT with the i5-5300U Processor, it has 8gb ram. https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd100509-overview-for-thinkpad-x1-carbon-type-20bs-20bt
Update: I have installed mint xfce but am downloading cinnamon and switching to that.
Linux isn’t really like that where one distro is better for certain hardware than others (the one exception being the few distros that avoid proprietary drivers like Debian). It’s really more of a personal preference. If you’re not sure, start with something easy for beginners like Mint or Kubuntu.
Well first of all the “best” distros in many people’s opinions are DIY ones like Arch or Gentoo and for older hardware it’s minimal distros which have learning curves of their own so such lists would probably be bad for beginners.
Anyways your hardware isn’t too slow so any distro should be usable I think. Choose one that is well known and that has a desktop environment (UI) you think your wife (congrats on having one btw) would like. If you have no idea, just go for the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint. Its UI is very much similar to Windows and it’s as easy to use as it gets.
If you’re feeling brave, you can try a distro with vanilla (not customized as hell) GNOME environment like Fedora. It’s unique and known for not having any features by default lol so it’s very easy once you get a hang of it. The UI is the most similar to Android than anything I’d say.
EDIT: any modern OS will be pretty slow if it’s installed on an HDD (spinning hard drive). If you have that, I’d highly recommend upgrading to a cheap SSD. The difference will be night and day, especially in boot times.
I am downloading Mint xfce currently, was to see how that runs and if it goes well do cinnamon. The laptop has an M.2 SSD, unsure of the capacity, but I am going to guess 512gb.
congrats on having one btw
Coming up on 24 years!
The laptop has an M.2 SSD
Yea then there should be no speed issues related to it.
Coming up on 24 years!
Wow you’re a real man. A ton of respect for you.
It still powerful laptop actually, any distro will work but for newbie mint ofc :)
I have Mint xfce downloading already. I figure I would live boot that and let her get a feel for it. Then try Cinnamon or another distro.
Cinnamon would be better for her, in my opinion, because it’s similar to Windows 7 in many logical concepts. I have many older people who have been using Mint Cinnamon since 2019, and I haven’t had to fix anything for them since then. Before that, it was a nightmare because they would click on any ads, and advertising malware would pollute the entire system.
I went with xfce because it said it was lighter weight. Switching to cinnamon is easy enough, I only have steam installed so far.
not sure of a tool like that but you can learn a lot about distros & reqs here: https://distrowatch.com/
for that machine, check out linux mint lmde, based on debian, if you’re looking for something stable & has minimal learning curve.
Edit: not really for this purpose. But maybe you can ask ChatGPT or European https://chat.mistral.ai/chat
i don’t know about such emulator that does that but, i have an old laptop (toshiba satellite E1 vision from around 2014) and i installed void linux 32bit with xfce desktop, it became usable again. it uses hdd. a little bit slow but usable. maybe it could be a recommendation for you
anything that isn’t windows will run on hardware like that, most Linux distributions are way more lightweight than even a modern browser
