Ubuntu Pros and Cons on an older machine

[Just1John]

This is an open forum for anyone to discuss their personal experience installing and thus overall satisfaction of Ubuntu (Any Blend) on their older machine. It's purpose is to allow someone who is considering installing it on an older system to determine whether or not they want to leave their system as is with an outdated OS (i.e. XP and Vista).

 

[Alabalcho]

My own experience is that hardware "obsolation" goes hand-in-hand between Windows and Linux. If you want smooth Linux experience on 2005 computer, load 2005 distro. Same applies to Android phones.

I know several people here will jump with "It's not secure, load current distro". But there are two problems:
- first problem is that current distro might be difficult (if impossible) to install on old hardware without some tweaking, hacking, etc
- second problem is the moment GNome or KDE is loaded, old hardware becomes old hardware.

So, one should either accept that his system will be not cutting edge (software wise), in security or visual department, or it will be slow.

 

[skittle]

The problem with old Linux distributions is that they are unsupported. No more software available and you will have a hard time to fix any issues.
Lxde and xfce run fine on circa 2005 hardware