Such flowery words for “please chuck your perfectly functional computer in the trash and buy a new one, you rube.”
My Windows 10 (formerly Windows 7) laptop has just started getting this popup when I boot it up. I’m definitely making plans, but those don’t include Windows. I’m thinking I’ll get a new SSD to replace the 10-year-old HDD currently in this thing and install some flavor of Linux, which will probably breathe tons of new life into it. Seriously, this laptop runs like ass currently, most likely because it’s got a decade-old Windows install that I upgraded to 10 when 7 ended support, and it was already slow as molasses back then.
As for which Linux distribution, I’m open to suggestions. I’ve been messing with Anti-X for a few years now after I installed it on a positively ancient WinXP laptop from 2003 just to get some Linux experience. The thing is though, I mainly picked Anti-X since my main requirement was to just have something that would run on a 32-bit system from the early 2000s. I haven’t really done much with that laptop since it’s so underpowered- even browsing many modern websites is asking way too much from it and you can just forget about Youtube.
Since I actually regularly use this laptop I want something that can fully replace Windows and also do some light gaming. I’d like to try out the Linux Steam experience and run the Linux versions of the emulators I currently use. This laptop is from 2011, so it’s not exactly a spring chicken either but it was my daily driver and main gaming machine from 2013 to about 2019. Specs-wise, it’s got 8 gigs of RAM, a GeForce GT 540M GPU and an i5-450M CPU.
I assume I could also do the stuff I want with Anti-X, but since I’m not presumably as limited by hardware with this laptop I’m open to trying out different distributions. “Gaming/emulation friendly” + “Windows-like UI” would be at the top of my wishlist.
Edit: Thanks everyone, I already made a live Mint USB and tried it out. It seems pretty nice, will install it on a new SSD later 
I not framiliar with antiX but I looked at https://antixlinux.com/download/ and this is clearly a distro aimed at people who are already experienced Linux users. It is probably a bit too graphically minimal to get started:
This would not be considered entry level IMHO. You should at least try something more mainstream. If you want to get into iceWM etc the option is always avilalble to you to install…
Also had a look at their forums https://www.antixforum.com/forums/forum/new-users/new-users-and-general-questions. Online support is arguably the MOST important aspect of choosing a distro for the novice user. There is some traffic but not much, and people in the “new users” section are getting answers without all the required details.
According to Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions AntiX is debian-based so information found on forums for ubuntu, mint and Debian itself will probably be useful most of the time.
here is the equivilant forum for Mint https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewforum.php?f=90 there’s a larger volume of Qs and As which you can search through as first line. The people answering are giving through responses more of the time. There are also other forums people are talking about Mint.
At the end of the day, try out whatever you feel like, it isn’t a lifetime commitment. I just beg you that if anti x doesnt work out to at least try something mainstream before giving up.
Like I said, I mainly picked Anti-X for my old WinXP laptop because it had great compatibility with really old systems. That said, I did actually manage to get kind of used to it. From what I tried, Mint definitely seems more slick, modern and user-friendly though and I’ll be trying that out on the Win10 laptop.
All Linux distros are compatible with really old systems :)