Like the title says I want to install a Linux distro on my old laptop. I am currently looking into installing a SSD, but I want to learn a distro for fun! I haven’t been able to find a good current resource aside from the Linux Masters here, so I am actually asking for help on the Internet! What distro is the best!?
EDIT: thanks so much everyone for your recommendations and advice! I installed a couple of different systems before deciding that I think the laptop may be able to support Fedora with KDE plasma (my favorite flavor of the installs so far) and I’m finding it really attractive and easy to use. You will see once I get some more disk space used how the performance holds up! If it runs into trouble I might switch the machine back over to mint with, that one seemed to run really well and was pretty familiar seeming from my Windows days, also seem more low end and booted a little faster. I think I might even end up switching to Linux on my desktop I had so much fun with it last night!! I really appreciate all the information and will probably be experimenting with a more lightweight build on this computer in the future! I’m a Linux user and it was easier than I ever thought! ❤️
That is a too old of a laptop. In reality, modern Linux distros run well in anything newer than 10-15 years. Yes, there are distros that you can install into it, but they won’t be the latest and greatest distros of today. They’d be instead distros made specifically for old computers, and these distros are usually more complex because they lack all the gui tools found on newer distros.
First you need to find out if your CPU is 32bit or 64 bit, and if it can take a minimum of 2 GB of RAM (if yes, upgrade it too). Then, I’d suggest you download the right file from here: https://www.q4os.org/downloads1.html I find Q4OS to be the best for old computers (more gui tools), but you’d need that minimum of 2 GB of ram to load a browser and be comfortable with 3-5 tabs (no more than that though or you’ll hit the swap). Also, consider Falkon or Chromium as a browser, they use less ram than firefox (people have downvoted me for saying that in the past, but it’s my experience).
Personally, I’d get a used laptop for $150 from the last 10 years, and install Linux on that. It should be way faster than your Asus laptop. Just make sure it has 8 GB of RAM to be comfortable with modern Linux distros (Linux Mint can work adequately with 4 GB of RAM, unless you want to do video editing).