Kudos to the LXLE
team – as far as I am concerned, you guys have hit one out of the
park! ;-)
Allow me to
explain... I have a 10+ year old Dell Inspiron 1150 that I bought
new from Dell in 2004. I used it daily at work for about 7 years...
it served me well and owes me nothing... I did have a MB failure
with this machine and Dell replaced the MB under warranty about 2 ½
years into my owning it... Until recently, it's OS was Windoze XP.
In 2009, I became
interested in Linux and began tinkering with it on a netbook testbed.
2 years later, I became comfortable enough with Linux to switch over
to it as my primary OS... I bought a cheap laptop (Dell Vostro 1050)
with Ubuntu on it. I wiped the Ubuntu and put a copy of Linux Mint 9
– Isadora on it... It became my primary office laptop... 3 years
later, I have 3 additional laptops – all running Linux Mint... 1
home laptop, 1 office laptop, 1 travel laptop, and the 4th
(that 2011 Vostro that was my original office Linux machine and is
now my “experimentation” machine) is going to my brother-in-law
this weekend because his laptop had a mishap and gave up the ghost...
I have actually infected several members of my family with Linux
laptops as well... wife, niece, daughter, brother-in-law... I even
had my mother-in-law running a Linux laptop for a while when my
daughter had an internet radio show... The point of all this is that
I am no stranger to Linux or Ubuntu based distros...
Now, getting back to
that 10+ year old Dell Inspiron... I was in my office earlier this
week and was looking at that old laptop sitting on my book shelf –
it has been there for a little over 3 years – collecting dust. It
still works and I have long since gotten everything of any importance
off it. Over the years, I have occasionally blown the dust off it
and boot it up to make sure it still works. On several occasions I
have tried to boot it with a Live USB stick containing any number of
distros that I thought I might like... It won't boot to a USB
containing any modern version of Linux Mint. It did boot Bodhi but
it was too foreign to me for me to be interested in installing it.
It did boot Peppermint OS and I liked it OK but wasn't in love enough
to install it at the time... So yesterday, I brought it home to
install something Linux on it and play with it. Last night I did
some research on good distros for aging hardware. I found a few
references to LXLE and decided to give it a try. I came here and
downloaded the LXLE 12.04.5 (32 bit version) ISO and then burned it
to a USB stick... plugged the stick into one of the USB ports on the
laptop, plugged it in, and turned it on... On the first attempt, it
booted perfectly and everything worked correctly RIGHT OUT OF THE
BOX. Specifically >>>
1) The touch pad
worked (I've had problems with a touch pad or 2 in the past)
2) The network
adapters both worked (historically a problem for some)
3) The sound worked
correctly – controls work and plugging in the ear phones automutes
the speakers as it is supposed to (not guaranteed across distros)
4) Video functioned
flawlessly – its limited performance is hareware based and not
software issued.
In short, I took a
10+ year old laptop that ran WinXP like a snail on sedatives and put
the 32 bit version of LXLE 12.04.5 on it. The OS worked perfectly
right out of the box. The computer is now very usable for common
computing tasks and has a new lease on life. Because of the
similarity to other OSs (Windoze, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.), the learning
curve is shallow and easily overcome even for a newcomer like me.
The interface is very intuitive and easy to figure out. The
installed system only takes up 4 GB (including the packages that I
added because I couldn't live without them – gnome-system-monitor
and inxi) not counting the swap partition which will be about the
same size as the RAM in the machine.
So, as I said
earlier, KUDOS to you the LXLE Team – you have created a light
weight distro with excellent (old) hardware compatibility that has an
aesthetically appealing and intuitive interface... all while
treading lightly on limited system resources... YOU NAILED IT! ;-)
Below are the specs
of my meager 10 y/o laptop >>>
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