Hello all,
So I have this old Samsung RV520 laptop. You can see the specs there. I’ve installed and reinstalled a few different linux distros on it for the past 12 years or so, the last one being Arch (btw) which is what I use as my daily driver on my main desktop as well (by the btw). But I really don’t need this laptop anymore, so I was thinking I’d give it as a birthday present to my friend’s son, who turns 2 this month. It would be used as a “media station” to basically just play kids’ videos from Youtube.
The problem is that I basically need to install an extremely windows-like (or otherwise simple) distro on it, because while my linux-fu is somewhat high level, my friend uses windows daily so system maintenance must be simple. Ubuntu is for me the obvious choice, but I’m not sure if the laptop can even run it anymore :D of course the HDD in it is also 16 years old and I’m pretty sure I’ll upgrade it to an SSD before set up. So, taking all this preamble into account, what would you recommend? Some Ubuntu-derivative, pure Debian, maybe even Arch with linux-lts? Give me your thoughts!
When you said 16 years, I was expecting something like a core 2 duo and 2gb of ram, but you got some nice specs in there. Any common distro will run fine. Users coming from windows tend to like linux mint, so that’s my suggestion.
Just realized it’s 14 not 16, but yeah I actually used that thing for gaming! Even games that were kinda new back then, up until Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor which ran at like 10 FPS. Thankfully I got enough money to buy and build my first desktop after that. Which served me faithfully for some 10ish years with no upgrades, even running RDR2 (with graphics so low it could be considered minus), which actually kinda surprised me!