I have several older Laptops (~10 years old) which currently run Windows 10. We run them in a makerspace-like environment. With the end of support of Windows 10, I am now looking for a Linux distribution with the following requirements:
- is lightweight, i.e. boots fast and is responsive
- works well with little RAM (some 4 GB, most 8 GB)
- works with smaller hard drives (240 GB, including all apps mentioned below)
- has a similar look and feel like Windows 10, because that’s what we are used to
- has excellent hardware support, so I don’t need to fiddle around on the command line for days. Our hardware are Dell and Lenovo Laptops.
- is gratis
The following applications must be supported:
- a browser, e.g. Firefox for web research
- video codecs, so we can watch Youtube tutorials and similar
- Arduino IDE 2.x (so the Linux has to be 64 bit) for programming
- Cura, so we can prepare stuff for 3D printing
- a PDF reader (we used Foxit Reader)
- a markdown editor, e.g. Obsidian
- an Office Suite to write “Word” documents, e.g. LibreOffice. We use LibreOffice already.
- we currently use local user profiles on Windows, since we don’t have a server. We plan to have remote user profiles and a server, so that anyone can log on at any Laptop have get his data back.
I have not used GUI Linux for more than 10 years now. However, I still have a headless Debian server.
Please do not suggest:
- Ubuntu. I used Ubuntu from 2004 to 2011, until they suddenly switched to Unity, which f***ed up everything for me. I switched back to Windows due to that incident. I’m still done with Ubuntu.
- something where I compile my own kernel. I will not.
I have tried:
- Elementary OS but it hangs during boot with Lenovo laptops
- Fedora but that one is too far from Windows. I only need one Desktop and the shutdown button bottom left. Also, it doesn’t show any messages during boot, so I was tempted to power the laptop off. There must be some progress, at least. Staring at a black screen is not what users do.
