Dug my old laptop out (HP G60, Turion X2 64) - and installed Mint XFCE on it - so far it’s useable, but of course still slow. I’m amazed it works as well as it does (3 GB ram and an SSD). The CPU usage is at 100% a lot of the time.
My question is, what distros do you guys like for this age of laptop? This is a spare so more for messing around. I was thinking of trying Arch as I’ve hard it’s somewhat lightweight but not sure. I’ve really only used Debian since I’ve been on linux.
I’d bet that arch is a good choice. It’s really lightweight, and great for learning about the console, managing packages, etc.
It’s only light if you configure it to be. It can be as heavy or as light as you want it to be, but it’s a good place to learn and experiment, as it’s comparatively trivial to switch stuff around. Arch wiki is probably the best Linux resource out there.
Also, arch is way less intimidating than its reputation suggests; especially on a secondary PC, where you can just run off to your main PC to look at the arch wiki.
Other than that, I suppose something like AntiX would probably run not-terrible on it as well.