Linux distributions for old hardware

Personally, I recommend starting with Puppy Linux. It’s small enough to run completely in RAM, so it doesn’t matter how slow or malfunctioning the hard drives on the old hardware are, it just works. If you can then use it to prove out the state of the hardware, you can upgrade to a larger distribution.

In addition, running in RAM is FAST. You’ve heard Linux can rejuvenate your old hardware and make it fast again? With the small distributions, that’s true!

This is a guide to Puppy and the other similar small distros, arranged from large, medium, and small.

Nice work.

14 Lightweight Linux Distributions to Give Your Old PC New Life https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-lightweight-linux-distributions-give-pc-lease-life/

A couple of thoughts on open source communities…

The open source communities continue to grow in amazing ways. In particular, tools made by developers, for developers, get a level of usefulness that it’s hard to compete with.

As I see it, it’s frankly impossible for ecosystems of common utility infrastructure done with closed source to compete with the open source community because open source, when motivated, releases more aggressively and takes more feedback into account.

Here’s the posting about progress on dev.to that reminded me of this.

Cheers,

Dak

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22 Miraculous Tools for React Developers in 2019 – DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻
— Read on dev.to/jsmanifest/22-miraculous-tools-for-react-developers-in-2019-4i46