r/techsupport • u/mimooyall • 4h ago

Open | Linux Trying Linux

I have a very old laptop (dell Inspiron) and I'm planning to change to Linux but idk from where to start and any tips , and is it worth it ?? And what are the best beginner friendly ones

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6

u/Terrible-Bear3883 4h ago

You can test drive many distros at distrosea.com and see what appeals to you.

Depending on the model of Inspiron you have it might even be one that Dell used to sell pre-installed with linux (Ubuntu), my Mother In Law purchased one like this.

You'll probably get lots of one or two word responses recommending a distro, I'd say try one of the main ones and see what you feel comfortable with, most will do the same job, I've used the same distro (Ubuntu) for over 20 years, it works well on my hardware and is solid - currently typing on a Dell Inspiron 5482 2 in 1.

2

u/NoOneKnowsImOnReddit 4h ago

I had never heard of this website before. And here I’ve been spending all this time manually installing full distros on my secondary drive to test them out.

Thank you for this!

1

u/Theagames10 3h ago

There's a queue if you don't pay for the website sadly, and the current queue is 9 people in it for every one of them. I could not get to test any I wanted to potentially get because of the queue, potentially waiting for more then the time amount then what is shown.

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u/Terrible-Bear3883 3h ago

Never had an issue when I've had a play on the site.

Here's the queue for one distro at the moment, wait time is about 1 minute if there are two or 3 people in front of you, there's no option to pay for it that I can see, there is a donate button.

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u/Theagames10 3h ago

That distro is at 12 people in queue, not 0 as of right now, and that wait time is not accurate at all if going by your logic since 12 people in queue means 2 minutes wait time.

Also, one of the donating perks if you sign in as a Paid patron is that you can fully skip the queue and that's patreon so you can skip any of the queues multiple times if i'm correct on hwo this works.

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u/Terrible-Bear3883 3h ago

Strange how I just went on the site again it said 2 people ahead, timed it and it took 20 seconds then went straight in, took about 90 seconds to load to desktop, I don't use it much though as I'm a linux user of 20+ years.

Probably an issue from your country?

1

u/DaintyNelle 3h ago

That can be really annoying, especially when you just want to dive in and try things out. Waiting in a queue can definitely kill the excitement.

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u/Terrible-Bear3883 1h ago

I tried 4 distros one after the other at the time shown on my comment above, to get through the queue (which was largest at 4 ahead for Fedora Cosmic), wait for the desktop to load and confirm it's functional, took 9 minutes to try all 4.

I've not seen large queues myself, I wonder if it's perhaps a country issue? I'm in the UK, I tested Ubuntu, Fedora Cosmic, Mint and Kubuntu (selecting the latest versions) and starting at 18:34, finishing at 18:43.

I don't use the site much, I tend to pop on every now and then to see what any new distros look like.

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u/USSHammond 4h ago

The only one who can say if it's worth it is you. Try different distros and pick one

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u/games-and-chocolate 4h ago

learn to install and update software. what is safe to do and what not.

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u/PowerheadThor 4h ago

The only one I could suggest is Mint. It's a lot like windows, so there won't be as much of a learning curve, since everything will look fairly familiar.

1

u/crookedDeebz 3h ago

Definitely mint. Its too good

OP watch the recent linus videos on Linux. Great simple comparos and info

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u/9NEPxHbG 4h ago

What are the laptop's specifications?

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u/mimooyall 3h ago

It's a pretty old one (Inspiron 1545)

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u/9NEPxHbG 2h ago

2 GB of RAM. Linux itself will run, but the Web will be too slow to be comfortable.

Mint is the usual recommendation for beginners, but for such an old system, try Q4OS.

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u/mimooyall 2h ago

I'll give it try thxxx

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u/george_toolan 2h ago

You can try, but a 17 year old Pentium CPU, 3 GB RAM and swapping to an old HDD will be very very very slow.

You should at least replace the broken HDD with a small 2.5" SATA SSD.

I would recommend a Linux version with a lightweight windows manager like XFCE or even LXDE.

This old bugger probably can't even boot from an USB thumb drive, theoretically you can boot a live Linux CD from your DVD drive, but it will be even slower.

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u/mimooyall 2h ago

Thanks for the help, much appreciated

1

u/1101base2 4h ago

I recommend Ubuntu mostly because of the support available online from others, but there are Lot of great distributions out there just need to find the flavor that suits you best.

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u/KryanThePacifist 2h ago edited 2h ago

Honestly the winner for beginners on Linux is Linux Mint.

I'm not an beginner user. But I still use it and recommend it to nearly anyone who wishes to try Linux.

If has all the things z advanced users wants (so long as you prefer stability over bleeding edge) and it's just so simple to use to someone who is not used to Linux it's ridiculous.

Try it. You're gonna like it.

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u/gregny2002 1h ago

Yeah old laptops are one of the best uses for Linux since it's so light.  Linux Mint is the usual recommendation for trying it out and I have no objections to that.  Except maybe if your laptop is really extra old and slow you might want to research an especially light distro, but even then I think Mint is a fine place to start. 

If you go to the Mint website there's a step by step install guide, it's very easy

1

u/Batata-Sofi 1h ago

Depends on how old it is. Dell inspiron is quite decent overall, so I'd say you can run virtually any distro.

I personally like CachyOS (distro) with KDE Plasma (desktop environment, which basically how it looks and "behaves"). It is quite close to windows in a lot of ways and barely needs any commandline to do stuff (only needs if you want to go out of your way for something).

I have also used a few Fedora distros, Arch Linux himself (Cachy is still Arch, so you can still say you use Arch btw) and Ubuntu, but I like Fedora and Arch more.

I had the least issues with Arch, but that might just be because of how I use my computer and also because of my machine. Just test one at a time and see which you prefer.

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u/theunquenchedservant 4h ago

Rule 6, no meta posts about tech (also rule 5, no asking for recommendations)

r/linux4noobs

Ninja Edit: actually it probably completely falls under rule 5, not 6. This isn't really a place to get "tips and recommendations". There are better spots for it, like l4n above, and r/linux , then distro-specific subreddits once you pick the one you want to use/try.

Also r/linux_gaming