Re:50MB operating system can resurrect your old PC
by wildzzz on Saturday October 10, 2026 @07:40PM
(#50038238)
Unless your PC is older than like twenty years, there's absolutely no reason you must use DSL or any distro that includes pre-x86_64 support. Gnome3 might be a little heavy on super crappy hardware but anything that comes prepackaged with XFCE is perfect for an older PC (Xubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, etc).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:50MB operating system can resurrect your old PC
by yjftsjthsd-h on Saturday October 10, 2026 @10:38PM
(#50039299)
Isn't 32-bit lighter on RAM use?
Re:50MB operating system can resurrect your old PC
by klaxce on Sunday October 11, 2026 @09:21AM
(#50043049)
I agree. I looked at DSL, TinyCore, Puppy, and then decided to try a “regular modern distribution”. I have an 11-year-old, early 2015 MacBook Air with an i5, 4gb of ram, and a weak battery, and have turned it into a nicely usable “couch terminal” with Fedora Sway Atomic. It was a good excuse to jump into a tiling wm, and I chose Fedora Atomic out of curiosity and a desire to have a stable base OS even if my battery died in the middle of an update.
But I could have gone with XFCE or Cinnamon or any of the other lighter-weight desktop environments and had a great experience, because it runs great. I have the cpu power pinned low while on battery, but on AC it’s quite fast. I could replace the battery for around $30, but it’s a different kind of project to try to make it work as well as possible for as long as possible.