Hi all, the private school I work at has a tonne of old windows 7/8 era desktops in a student library. The place really needs upgrades but they never seem to prioritise replacing these machines. Ive installed Linux on some older laptops of mine and was wondering if you all think it would be worth throwing a light Linux distro on the machines and making them somewhat usable for a web browsing experience for students? They’re useless as is, running ancient windows OS’s. We’re talking pre-7th gen i5’s and in some cases pentium machines here.
Might be pointless but wonder what you guys think?
useless
pre-7th gen i5’s
I’ve got systems with second and third gen i5s that are handling Windows 10 just fine, seems like what the school really needs is some SSDs.
Linux would definitely run better, so that’s worth it too.
If this school is heavily embedded im the Google ecosystem, ChromeOS Flex is an option. FydeOS is similar but without the Google Account requirement.
My first try would be mint, second endeavorOS with KDE
If they can run Windows 7, they can run any Linux.
We’re talking pre-7th gen i5’s
My gaming and photo editing PC has a 4th gen i5.
It’s exactly what I did when I was a student. There was an old pc that had a broken winXP install. I put Xubuntu on it and made it publicly accessible to the students. They loved it.
Windows 7/8 … “Old machines”…
…
Am i this old ?
I left windows as xp got replaced with 7.
If I were to install Windows as a dual boot, that’d probably be my choice (xp).
My current machine was a 7, but the previous owner had installed Ubuntu by the time I bought it. It’s slow enough, there’s no way I’d put myself or the computer through running windows.
Yes, I was born before the Internet was.
They’re over 10 years old at this point, Windows 10 released in 2015, 9 years ago.
Unfortunately, yes, we are old!
daily drive Arch on a Core i3 550 ,I think you’ll be able to figure out something
I highly recommend scavenging the machines, you’re going to have your best chance with the machines if they’re maxed out on RAM even if you end up with 1/4th of the total machines
My son is using my 12 year old Asus 1215 netbook, that cost 300€ back then with Xubuntu to learn programming. Works fine. He can even run Minecraft on it. It glitches a lot though. It has an Intel Atom cpu…
We first tried Linux MX, but Xubuntu runs better.
Friend of mine runs Linux on a 15 years old cheap consumer laptop, and it’s working smoothly for browsing.
Just try. There’s no risk and no costs trying. Have fun.
As long as you can secure them it should be fine, and as long as you can deal with the user account issues. You’ll either need to join them to your Windows domain or explain to people why they can’t use their normal username and password. You’ll probably find the kids understand it better than the teachers.
Yeah, securing them might be the biggest challenge tbh. I work full-time at the school and won’t really have time to provide tech support. The windows machines are ‘managed’ by a third-party IT solutions company, but like I said they’re mostly useless at this point and are rarely turned on anymore.
Students don’t have user accounts so a generic log in could work. could see the school not allowing a Linux install without some sort of management/tech support procedure in place though. Security is probably the biggest hurdle to clear but I guess if we’re paying an IT company to manage window machines I don’t see why they couldn’t support Linux too, unless they’re unfamiliar with the OS :(
I mean, any modern Linux distro will be more secure out of the box than win 7/8 which are several years past their end of life.
Oh for sure, it’s just explaining that to boomer management that’s tough
I would just tell them, “look, Microsoft, the people who made this software, are telling us to never connect it to the internet again because it’s insecure and will get viruses. Our only options are to either pay for new licenses for their latest OS for each machine (which probably isn’t even compatible with the old hardware) or install a completely free OS that is open source and will promote tech literacy with our students.”
useless
pre 7th gen i5’s
We must live life on completely different parameters
Yeah, I said they’re “useless as is”, because they’re running an outdated OS, have internet explorer on them, etc. the hardware is obviously far from useless but getting it to a good place in terms of user experience for a younger audience will involve a time investment. So yes, useless as is.
I still use my i5-4670k machine. It has a SATA SSD, only 8GB RAM, but it is a completely zippy machine. Ancient (by today’s standards) 750Ti, but I only rarely use it for old games (Xonotic and Portal2) and it doesn’t break a sweat.
Debian, i3wm, so it ends up being lightweight but that’s my preferred setup regardless of specs.
totally doable. But if you yeet the bloat, windows 10 will be more than fine. My dad runs windows 10 on a i5 2430m all in one. My old school computers had i5 2400s and 4 gb of ram and they ran windows 10 without too much issue.
Yeah I’ve installed LTSC on a couple of machines too (goofygoobers version, I think) so that’s another option
I think you’ll find these machines are exceedingly usable when you put a non-bloated OS on them
They’re unlikely to do worse than my laptop from 2008, and it’s perfectly usable under Linux (bit of a lag when starting up large programs, that’s all). As has already been said, go for a lighter desktop environment (XFCE, LXQT, Mate, TDE) unless these machines were high-spec’d for their era. For the oldest machines, you might want to consider installing Puppy Linux rather than one of the more mainstream distributions, since Puppy specializes in old x86-family hardware.
I think those reporting success running Linux on old hw should state the distro and window manager that they’re using if they want to provide useful feedback. I’m not in that group, but Tiny Linux comes to mind. Possibly Alpine? Probably better info to be had from daily-drivers.
If the machine has 4GB of RAM, then MATE, XFCE, LXDE, and LXQT will work well. I’ve used all of them on older computers. The distro doesn’t really matter. If it has 8GB of RAM or more, it will run any DE you want to use.
If the machine has less than 4GB of RAM and can’t be upgraded, it’s not going to be very useful. Sure, you can put a lightweight window manager on them, but they are not going to run a web browser well. They could still be used for teaching students how to install Linux though.
or they can be used as a server. trust me it works good as a server.
