Helped a guy and reduced landfill waste, all in one move. Time well spent.

I got a laptop with an HDD a while back because I'm an idiot "more storage space hurr durr!"

It took 10-15 minutes to boot and another 5-10 just to open a web browser when it was running Windows 10. Even once stuff was open, everything was so laggy that it wasn't really usable. I'd miss a solid chunk of whatever we were supposed to be doing on our laptops in class when I was using it for that.

Linux changed EVERYTHING. It boots in just a couple of minutes and only needs a minute or two to settle itself before things start running smoothly. I even managed to play Hollow Knight on it with no lag!

People don't realize how bloated Windows is until they try Linux. If your computer is slow and was made in the last 10 years, no it isn't, your OS is.

A little trick you can do if your friend experiences too much memory limitations when browsing the web is to use the 32 bit version of firefox. I use it in a machine with only 2gb, and it helped a lot.

I've been putting together a lot of old laptops for friends and family, so here's my opinion based on my experience:

Your CPU speed is ok (that CPU scores 932 passmark points, which is ok for dekstop usage and youtube at 360p (you should set up his youtube at 360p, and to not autoplay). If this was Chrome, that cpu could do 480p, but firefox is much slower than chrome on youtube. The difference in speed is not visible on fast systems, but it is visible on very old ones (anything less than 1500 passmark points).

Your biggest problem is the RAM. You have only 2.77 GB of RAM, which is NOT enough for normal web browsing in this day and age -- if you're using lots of tabs. The moment you will open more than 2-3 tabs with heavy websites (e.g. facebook, nytimes, and linkedin), you will start swapping like crazy with Cinnamon. So your user will always have to be conscious of what apps they have open (and make sure you configure 4 GB of swap too, just in case).

Mate and XFCE should be using less RAM, indeed (about 600-800 MB instead of 1.3 GB on Cinnamon). I find XFCE more stable personally, and it only uses 100 MB more RAM than Mate on average. The only good thing Mate has over XFCE is that it comes with a user administrative gui app. I usually install that on xfce ("mate-user-admin").

You'd have a bigger impact by putting a modern SSD in there, even if SATA.

Recently did something similar and yeah it seems Mint, specially LMDE in my case, is a great fit for such cases. It's on that sweet spot between being too bare and too bloated.

If hardware/budget allow it, you might want to throw in a cheap SSD and some more RAM. Something like 50€ could greatly improve usability.

Any reason MATE over Xcfe? Just curious if the performance is close or MATE is better at things, not trying to question your decisions. I have a >9 year old PC at this point and installed Cinnamon on it but was finding it a bit laggy. I tried out the other editions but am sticking with LMDE for now, but sort of feel like I don't really need nice animations, I just need more CPU for faster compile times, haha

Warms my crusty heard seeing tech saved from a landfill. Good job

This is so cool and wholesome, thank you.

Switch out the swap file for zram

Silly question but what do ya'll use to get that fancy summary?

Such a great project. Bringing joy to a friend and reduce e-waste at the same time. Love it. Would give away the SSD from my old Core 2 Duo based laptop (which got replaced by a used Gen4 i7 laptop from my company when they sold the devices to employees for very little money. Now they are giving them to schools for free, which is great). Sending it around half the planet is neither free nor sustainable, though. Would be cheaper to buy a new one. But maybe you find someone to help out. For me, an SSD was a great improvement for that old machine. As stated in another comment, upgrading RAM did not work in that particular case.

You may wanna try putting a solid state drive in. It will boost performance so much

We have a crazy old laptop that we used to watch movies on when I was a child. That now also runs Linux Mint really well.

I think a slim Fedora KDE would also be very fine, as Cinnamon is really quite painful to use. But they have a really nice set of user friendly minimal apps.

Nothing I would recommend to people switching from other OSes though, as its just too minimal and especially Nemo is awful. Like, no link support??

Can it run Warframe though

Jk, well done

This was basically my first laptop. Thanks for this reminder

Question for you guys.

How do you know which version to install relative to the hardware? Is it just trial and error?

I have some 13 year old Macs but I’m not sure which distro and version to go with and I’m not keen on spending days figuring it out.

I recall reading another post from some guy who went through like six installs with various problems. Didn’t seem encouraging.