hp pavilion a465c
Mother board: P4SD-LA
Chipset: P4 3 ghz w HT
4gb ram
1 tb external WD HDD.
No extras, all onboard video, sound etc, except for NIC which is a TrendNet TEW-641-PC wireless card.
Still works just fine on win 7 but M$ wants to force everyone into their pay to play scheme that I suspect will hit with win 11 or whatever they will call it and this box will not pass the install for w10.
There are so many possibilities I figure I would give the community a try.
Any suggestions on which linux version is best for something like this?
Itās a little bit like saying āwhich color is the bestā when people ask which distro to use.
Iāve used all kinds of flavors. Ubuntu is the de-facto standard. The Kubuntu GUI is a lot more windows-like. OpenSUSE is pretty awesome. Those are the three I generally circle around.
Mint is what I use here on all of my Linux boxen but one (And itās an old (old old) gentoo system).
That being said, I recently go rid of the last regularly used 32 bit box here and Iām so happy to be able to run Java with greater than 2 gig wherever I want.
I would recommend Mint with Xfce desktop. Mint because it is based on Ubuntu and good for newcomers and Xfce because it seems Xfce is less resource-hungry than Cinnamon or GNOME by considering your available RAM.
Still works just fine on win 7 but M$ wants to force everyone into their pay to play scheme that I suspect will hit with win 11 or whatever they will call it and this box will not pass the install for w10.
for a windows i hold with 8.1 (with disabling some windows spywares )
windows 10 is madness already. (i heard friends had auto-uninstalled legal games, because windows āthought its illegalā so wellā¦)
About linux suggest:
Centos for advanced users.(its stable versions of Fedora with stable libs, since Fedora is ātesting newest libs systemā that is madness)
Ubuntu for newbie users (idk about Mint)
About security i suggest firejail runned browsers.(and discord if you will use)
to let you know Wayland as GUI is new standard, but its unstable(some apps dont work on it)
About MAC(pseudo linux):
its good only if you use it as they want it. (well its kind of linux, but with Windows like clickable panels - where some of things ācan only be done via clicks, not terminalā, heard their Server also require āclicksā ) I were using it in previous work for years. Nice tools for mobile(ofc their iphone) debugging/etc or other tools, but overall i prefer some linux.
But overall, if you play games, you would need Windows anyway as second system or on second computer.(yeah i also dont like what they do, but most people dont careā¦ so it will not change)
Yeah, thats what I am seeing here and on searches.
I am leaning this way myself now. Not sure if its worth all the effort I have spent trying to save this thing from the scrap heap. 7 days so far fixing things I didnāt know were even a problem until trying to upgrade.
They are discontinuing 32 bit with ubantu so I am not sure its worth the effort now.
I discovered quite by accident that win 10 is very scary and something I should avoid installing. While trying to upgrade this 32 bit box I tried to login to my M$ outlook account on my other computer and was hit with an account lockout for absolutely no reason.
I did successful account recovery and was immediately locked out again, did another recovery, same thing only to have my account blocked for 24hrs. This made me do some searching which brought up people being locked out of win 10 computers because they used their outlook accounts for their password selection during upgrade of their computers instead of using the local password option.
This again lead to another discovery that M$ just recently removed direct access to the local option a couple months ago and now you have to disconnect your network from the internet for it to show up.
This leads me to believe they are about to remove it completely in the near future which would give them full control of access to your computer. To me that means they are about to start that monthly payment scheme for using windows.
Since win 7 is EOL now, they may be doing it very soon.
No idea how to even get the outlook account back, there are no explanations why its blocked so there are no solutions to fixing it.
Ill checkout these suggestions for my 64 bit box since it looks like windows is now a no-go.
I use Fedora almost exclusively. Very stable and fast. Has good package support and is kept up-to-date.
Fedora is the upstream to Centos/Redhat.
Something that is āupstream to Centos/Redhat.(for example centos use 2+ versions before of Fedora base)ā cant be āvery stableā
as i remember Fedora was officially known as āpackage testing systemā. So i dont belive in this āvery stableā. this 2 bold words are opposite words.
Regarding this, itās true if you want to play āall the gamesā. But if you just like games, there are TONS of games on Steam that work fine on Linux now. It has built in Wine that is quite goodā¦ at least in the version my son runs. (All of the computers in the house except my āworkā computers run Linux Mint.) For the past six months or so, Iām not sure heās found a Steam game that heās wanted to play but couldnāt.
That being said, there are plenty of games not on Steamā¦ but still. He plays games all the time and hasnāt died from being on Linunx.
BTW, for folks interested in reading more about what Iām talking about āSteam Protonā is what you want to Google. You can also find databases that attempt to track games that have worked for folks. e.g.: https://www.protondb.com/
One of the interesting things about using a WINE-based solution is that itās impossible to know all of the games that actually work. So having these sort of user-driven databases is really nice until Steam discovers all of the ones that work fine and whitelists them.
CentOS is based on RHEL and on the same code base and can be used or the benefit of stability that is derived from RHEL whereas Fedora is a base for implementing new functionalities mostly and is beneficial in this case.
I dont want loose time now to search, but Fedora is known as āRed Hat testing groundā so its unstable when comparing to redhat or centos.
Fedora is not bad, but telling its āstableā is wrong, because its trully āunstableā.
Centos for normal user can be too difficult anyway.(lack of libs/some packages in default stable repos) - need to know which repos to use.(or compile manually - also know what) - if you for example used wrong(unstable) repo or something else, then ofc you made issues.
Itās only a guesstimate of popularity, but itās a good place to see where the general community is focusing lately. Linux-nerd-wars scoreboard.
Linux Mint is my go-to recommendation for new users, being a mature, desktop-focused distro. It seems to be one of the more reliable ones which just work without fuss. If I were setting up a new PC for mom today, this is what Iād likely go with.
MX Linux is one Iād also recommend (currently #1 on distrowatch, probably for good reason). I only list it second because Iām less familiar with it than Mint.
The main general advice Iād give is to stick with a Debian based distro to start off. Debian distros seem to provide the best access to the software youāll likely be using, with minimal hassle, in my experience. I also feel Debian based distros tend to focus more on the desktop-user experience than the other popular variant (Fedora stuff).
Fedora variants, RHEL (Red Hat) etc. are apparently the typical business commercial (server) choice. Iām not sure how friendly theyād be for gaming and other non-business type stuff. If your intent is to build skills for the workplace, it could make sense to try one of these, but I didnāt find it necessary myself. And besides, āyumā is just a silly name for a package manager.
Last thingā¦ if the first distro doesnāt work out well for you, keep trying. Part of the fun of Linux is all the choices that MS canāt/doesnāt give you.
)
) I were using it in previous work for years. Nice tools for mobile(ofc their iphone) debugging/etc or other tools, but overall i prefer some linux.
