My laptop is a Thinkpad T40 from 2003 with 1GB of RAM and a 30GB HDD (Yes, you can laugh now). I bought it second hand many years ago, it had Windows installed and it was slow as molasses. It was also a time that I got interested in FLOSS. So I looked for a suitable Linux distro and I found Puppy Linux (Slacko and later the TahrPup release). It turned my unusable laptop into a fast and very capable computer. I’ll never forget the amazement when I booted Puppy for the first time and saw how fast it was.
I’m not much of a distro hopper but last year I switched to AntiX because I felt that development of Puppy had slowed down. AntiX does more or less the same as Puppy in that it brings life to an old computer. Both are very lightweight but at this moment I find AntiX definitely more polished with JWM, FluxBox and IceWM as window managers to choose from.
Antix 17.4 screenshot with the minimalistic FluxBox window manager with Conky on the right side. The windows open are the terminal (running Poor Mans Radio Player) and in the background SpaceFM (the file manager).
Both Puppy and AntiX contain, as do most of the other Linux Distros, proprietary bits and pieces (e.g drivers and it’s possible to install proprietary programs from the Snap store or PPM) but are mostly FLOSS and are available thanks to many volunteers that dedicate so much of their time to these operating systems. So I think it’s fair to contribute back e.g by donating to the developers that make this possible.
Link to the Antix website.
Link to the Puppy Linux website.