The most important thing is whether it's 32 or 64 bit. If it's 32 bit you're going to need a special distribution for 32 bit computers. 64 bit you're probably fine with just about anything honestly.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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I have been gifted a few ancient laptops from the stone age
oh so laptops from 1990s? cool i love to have one actually
(2005-2014).
excuse me? what? 2014 is ancient? fr? am i this out of touch?
(im not old, new technology pricing is just too much for me. im still stuck in 2016 hardware wise).
Me crumbling to old person dust when a gen alpha calls Windows 8 an ancient OS.
My bad I didn't mean for people to catch strays lol. I'm 'old' relatively speaking age wise. I just meant how tech older than 5 years is considered old. I could go on a rant on how wasteful and stupid that concept is but unfortunately its the way of the world today.
Nah, you're good. Oldest PCs I still have are a bunch of beige boxes with Windows 2000 still on them and an Inspiron 9400 with Windows 7.
Right? These laptops dont even have floppy drives.
our computer still had a floppy drive until around 2016 i think. good times. unfortunately everything we had on floppy was for DOS not windows xp and i was just a kid so i didn't know how to get DOS working.
I've seen folks have good luck with MX Linux for hardware from that era, its a lightweight distro based on AntiX
IIRC they’re also run by anarcho-communists. Some of the few who still support 32-bit hardware. And there are several variations on AntiX/MX including one for music production which is impressive consider the restraints.
This is true, the "Anti" in AntiX is for Anti-Fascist as well
Something I have wanted to do is take an old laptop, convert it to a desktop, create a case for the screen and motherboard, wall mount the case, add a device like a leap motion for touch controls, and use it as a smart home control panel and/or a fancy weather clock with apps installed for sticky notes, photo album, etc.
Unfortunately the newest laptops you have are just a generation shy of meeting the minimum cpu requirements (AVX instruction necessary) for the leap motion in particular, but there may be alternatives.
I also suggest turning them into emulation boxes.
You may try Puppy Linux or anything with XFCE like Xubuntu
There's Tiny Core Linux if you wanna take it to the extreme
I think the main thing to check is whether it can run 64-bit OS and whether it has SATA ports for an SSD.
I was able to run Arch with some tiling WM using this old laptop: https://www.newegg.com/asus-u50-series-15-6-intel-core-i3-330m-intel-hd-graphics-4gb-ddr3-memory-500gb-hdd/p/N82E16834220763
Main issue was playing videos which caused the laptop to overheat. Overall, the performance was not good, but I was still using a laptop HDD instead of an SSD, which would significantly impact its performance. I also had a weird amount of RAM installed like 6GB for some reason lol
Run a little static website from them
I have a 2007 Acer laptop with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with LXQt which I use for torrenting. Works great.
You could also install batocera and run retro games and console emulators. I’ve done this with an old Raspberry Pi 1 from 2012 and my kid loves to play Sonic and Super Mario with it.
There's gonna be a pretty significant usability difference between a 2005 laptop and a 2014 one, most modern distros would probably run just fine on the latter, while the former would want a specialized lightweight distro.
I added details to the post on the laptops in question
Throw a cheap SATA SSD and a second ram stick in the Inspiron 15 3537 or the Satellite C55 and you've got a decent little machine for productivity and browsing on a modern distro. The HP 2133 netbook was probably barely usable even in its time, and the Inspiron 1545 might be alright with a lightweight distro like puppy linux.
Have an old ThinkPad that has a first-gen Vulcan GPU, and with Proton Sarek and Bazzite use it for light gaming while away from desktop. Tried several other distros and getting support for old hardware was frustrating but Bazzite worked out of the box.
Another has Chimera Linux and the setup guide was easy to follow and had a smother time with it than any automated install, which was a surprise as it was really intimidating. It uses replacements for old, slow software and runs lean. Only Wayland, no Xorg. Dinit instead of systemd. BSD userland instead of GNU coreutils (so “doas” instead of “sudo” and such). So lean, fast, responsive even on the older hardware since there’s no legacy overhead.
Still, YMMV and depending on hardware and goals there are dozens of distros for older hardware to try out. That eLive retrowave one is fun and feels like using an even older laptop and dazzles onlookers but is certainly not going to be to everyone’s taste.
These are great suggestions, I'll be sure to look into them!
I ran Debian with XFCE on a 2006 laptop (32 bit), worked well.