Not entirely true in my case, I’ve got an old Inspiron 530 that I have been trying to figure out what to do with. Well it ran Vista from the factory so that’s worthless now, so I figured I’d try putting Linux on it. Every single distro I tried installing just wouldn’t get past the splash screen. Mint, Ubuntu, Arch (GUI and manual installer), Pop_OS, ChimeraOS, nothing. Trying different USB media writing methods did nothing or made it not even show as a bootable device. Finally got Xunbuntu to work on it and even that took 3 attempts to install.
I’ve got a more recent HP that was originally Win 7 that did have a much higher success rate and an old Acer laptop that straight up will not boot Linux without a high amount of errors or just completely borked graphics even with multiple distros.
But I’m also an idiot so it’s probably me.
n2burns@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Eh, depends how much older. My daily is a Thinkpad x201, and while I love Linux Mint, every once in a while I get curious about other distros. However, as many times as I’ve tried, there’s a bunch of distros whose LiveUSBs just won’t boot (for example Pop! OS).
radivojevic@discuss.online 1 month ago
I think, realistically, anything up to 10 years ago can run most distros. Some better than others, of course, because of the DE load.
I’ve got kde neon on a 2013 MacBook Air and it’s great. I also have put Ubuntu budgie and SDesk on an old HP Chromebook with 4gb of ram. And, obviously the 16gb disk is crippling, but it runs better than expected haha.
GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I wish I could get an x201 with an identical form factor and keyboard, indicator lights, etc, but otherwise upgraded components (cpu/ram/display/ports). That is my dream.
I also have an x201, but it runs too warm and too noisy for me to keep up with it. I now have an M1 Macbook which I use Asahi Linux and macOS on with about a 50/50 split. But the x201 feels better in the hand and on the desk.
n2burns@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
100%. I know this computer is getting to the end of it’s life. I’ve upgraded it as much as possible (SSD, 8GB of RAM, new battery) and it still lives almost completely on it’s dock.
I’ve previously looked into converting it to a USB or bluetooth keyboard, and now I’m curious if I could convert it to a KVM console for a SteamDeck. I’m not quite sure yet if this idea is brilliant or brain-dead (probably both).