[I'm replying to the original post, but I have seen the subsequent traffic.]
On Mon, Feb 26, 2024, at 13:20, Andrew Greig via luv-main wrote: > I am intending to lend a friend this device for his travels in Europe > mainly to get photos off his camera SD card and into a suitably sized > ext, HDD, > > When I turned it on I found it had a Mageia OS (RPM) I have the BIOS set > for boot from USB stick. > > Any tips for a functional and speedy OS to load, please? Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "modern". I've got a few old machines with similar specs to yours. I run Debian on them (current stable or testing), and find that works fine, considering the machines' capabilities. But as Nic Baxter pointed out, probably choice of things like desktop environment (and window manager and filesystem) matters more than the underlying distro (and configuration, like say switching off GUI animations). Myself, I mainly use Xmonad (and sway under Wayland) as tiling window managers, as being lighter weight, and LXDE for family members who expect a more conventional GUI interface. (AFAIK, LXDE mainly uses OpenBox as its window manager.) In particular, I have an Asus Eeepc 1000HE, with very similar specs (Atom N280 instead of N270). For simple things, like copying files about, it's fine — though it struggles with Javascript-heavy websites and multiple tabs in a web-browsers, and with image processing (like for photo editing). I expect your experience would be similar. In general, and especially if you're travelling, having an encrypted filesystem is a good idea, as Debian and other distros provide, but not all. And as Andrew McGlashan mentioned, upgrading RAM can help — but I doubt that's possible as the RAM is likely soldered on. It's a matter of money, but replacing the hard-drive with an SSD could help quite a lot. (And it's a somewhat orthogonal issue, but getting a good third-party replacement battery can extend the machine's useful life.) I hope these comments are of some use. — Smiles, Les. _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
