linuxmemes

"Old laptop" has a Core 2 Duo and 4GB of DDR2 RAM.

It also has a better keyboard with plenty of travel, on-the-go replaceable battery, easily accessible components likely to get replaced/upgraded/cleaned, large cooler, large selection of I/O, has higher likelihood to survive 2 more years than a brand new laptop and it can be used as a weapon or anchor.

My current laptop is an i7 with 16 GB of RAM. Hardware requirements have plateaued pretty hard unless your trying to run something that requires the latest GPU.

shit that's better than my main laptop

If your craptop is using an HDD instead of an SSD, replacing it with an SSD would be a cheap upgrade you could do that would make a massive improvement.

Linux Mint cinnamon is gold standard for quality IMO. All my modern systems that can comfortably run it do.

That said it also uses more resources than your old craptop may like depending on just how old we are talking about.

If cinammon is a little slow, try mint xfce. Its a lot lighter on system resources. Last time i tried xfce it was a great performance compromise if a little unpolished in places.

If Mint xfce is also too slow you can give MX Linux a whirl. Its way faster and more minimal that mint out of the box. Yet it feels modern and allows you to install all the same programs as mint from the default software repo including flatpaks. MX fluxbox is probably as minimal as you would want to get. Try their flagship xfce first.

If you are trying to beat new life into a 25 year old dying dinosaur Puppy Linux will do it, but you won't enjoy using it.

For a server for hosting services like in this meme? I always go Debian. Incredibly stable.

You might want to upgrade to an ssd

I agree, mint is a good place to start. If it turns out to be too much for your pc you could always try antix or q4os or puppy linux next, which is even more lightweight.

But I have recently found that mint is like a better version of ubuntu and I used to recommend ubuntu all the time because 9/10 times it just works.

It's one of those prehensile dolphin dicks.

tinyllama 1.1b would probably run reasonably fast. Dumb as a rock for sure. But hey its a start! My 2015 t460 thinkpad laptop with an i7 6600U 2.6GhZ duo core was able to do llama 3.1 8B at 1.2T-1.7T/s which while definitely slow at about a word per second. Still, was also just fast enough to have fun in real time with conversation.

Kiwix

The worms are back again. Gotta dig out out Microsoft's parasites with a screw driver.

For me, the worst part of setting up some new distro or service is when it's done and everything works. Then it just... Sits there. Working. Usually at some task I don't need very often. Very anticlimactic and boring. Then I have to find some other new thing to try, which is why my HTPC has been through like 4 distros in the past year.

It streams video through your LAN network so its equivalent client can play it. The name VLC comes from Video Lan Client which was the app's original purpose.

I thought those were lines.

Thanks randint glad you liked it!