Which Ubuntu?

[Tom Mitchell]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 11:46 AM Ian Bruntlett <ian.bruntlett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am working on some seriously old and slow laptops that have been given to a charity I'm volunteering for. They have slow hard discs and not that much memory (i.e. 1GiB upwards).
>
> I'm looking for an Ubuntu variant that does not mind running on low-end hardware. Any suggestions?
>

My advice is to just try what loads.

I am 'old school' and learned Unix on a 300 baud modem.
A local Linux using the alt tty windows is worthy.   Unix was first crafted
to drive hot metal typesetting for patent office processing at Bell Labs and
became a lot more.
Good text editors exist, nroff, troff can format markup text.
TeX will run.
mutt can mail to and from a gmail account.
Then 'startx' to view pdf files and run a browser with a minimum of tabs.

I keep seeing advertising  'a writers" computer tool that has no
browser.  A simple keyboard text editor stream of thought editor.
Your old hardware would be up to the task.
The 32 bit world supported by raspberry pi folk is well maintained.

The "startx" trick made the early under powered Raspberry Pi boards very useful.
This has promise i386.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/