A friend of someone related doesn’t have a laptop nowadays, but needs one. Now we have 2 old laptops at home, and we want to give her one so she can do some things on it. Since she isn’t used to laptops and the old laptops wouldn’t run a Windows 11 (I don’t want to install a Win10 because of end of support and lacking security features), I guess installing a simple Linux is fine. Now comes the big question: Which Linux distro should I install? (see requirements below)

Laptops:

  • Acer Aspire ES 15, AMD dual-core E1-7010 @1.5 GHz, 4GB RAM, 1000 GB HDD
  • HP Pavilion 17-e030ez, Intel Pentium @2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM, 10000 GB HDD (I’d choose this)

Tasks:

  • Office Stuff (I thought about OnlyOffice)
  • Internet surfing
  • Banking via Web

Requirements:

  • needs to have full German support
  • needs an easy software installation center
  • should be easy to learn
  • optionally, her friends (which probably use Windows/ Mac) should be able to help her (since she never had a laptop before)
  • eventually German forum/ German Guides

I’m using Linux/ Manjaro for myself but don’t have any experience with beginner-friendly distros. I used a KDE neon for some time and also have used Ubuntu, and to be honest, they seem beginner-friendly too.

Please let me know your opinions, thanks!

  • chraebsli@programming.devOP
    10·
    2 months ago

    Yeah, it’s an old laptop. She doesn’t have much money for a new laptop and since she won’t use it often, it’s enough to check mail, e-banking, … And we have some old laptops at home nobody uses, so we thought we could give it to her as a gift.

    Eventually, she’ll buy a new ~400$ laptop later with some good specs but that’s not in the next few months. But thanks for the tips.

    • masterofn001
      1·
      2 months ago

      On my living room setup hooked up to a projector:

      mint xfce
      sff tower
      dual core
      only 3GB ddr2. (One slot fried) 1080p via display port to HDMI 1tb HDD Use 2 VPN. An sshd server Myriad physical issues. Old as fuck BIOS.

      (Was released in 2009 or 2011?)

      Memory is a bit of a pain sometimes. Mostly Firefox needs to be closed and reopened after system sleep.

      I can watch 4 football games in HD with no real issue.

      It is tweaked to high heaven in kernal and configs.

      As long as it can work I will make it work.