There is a nice new Linux distribution, LXLE. This is a very light and fast Linux distro based on Ubuntu. This would run fine on an older machine that cannot handle the full Ubuntu distribution. This is very helpful of the user has an old machine that they are not using, and wish to press it in to service running Linux to perform various tasks and do not want to buy a whole new machine just to run Linux. This distribution run the LXDE desktop environment and is fast to boot. Modern Linux distros like Ubuntu 18.04 can be slower than this with Systemd and all the services running. The desktop has the familiar bars at the top and bottom like the old Gnome desktop, this is very familiar to use.
- More info: https://www.lxle.net/.
- Download LXLE: https://www.lxle.net/download/.
This is a fully featured desktop operating system, not a minimal OS for an embedded system, but it is minimal on system resources. So it would take up less RAM than a modern bloated distro. While still shipping with enough components such as Office and Web browser to be usable on a day to day basis. Computers are getting faster all of the time, but older machines are getting left behind, and it is good that there are still Linux distributions that can run on these older machines and keep them going. This could be used to create an email or SSH server to complement your network, even a very old machine could handle this. A modern super-fast computer is really not needed. An alternative could be to run FreeBSD or OpenBSD, that would be very secure, but this is about Linux and not UNIX. It would be nice to have a distribution of Ubuntu with the FreeBSD UNIX kernel, a UNIX distro, but with all of the software preinstalled that comes with Ubuntu. That would be very interesting to see.
This distribution comes with the Seamonkey browser and the email client for managing your email.
The Seamonkey web browser is a more free as in beer version of Firefox.
This works very well when browsing the web.
This distribution also comes with a music player and movie player for multimedia. As well as the Transmission Bittorrent client for obtaining movies. And also legitimate files. Office software consists of Abiword and Gnumeric, as well as Homebank, but this can be supplanted with the package manager system.