It saved my 2007 laptop so maybe
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Nothing can save this tiny laptop from 2010.
2010 comes for us all.
How's Linux Lite these days? That was always my go-to for old machines.
Hannah Montana Linux can do anything.
You can probably do Youtube via mpv + yt-dlp. You'll probably have to make sure you are only grabbing the codecs you have hardware decoding capabilities for, though. It's not as convenient, of course, but it's a lot less taxing on your hardware.
This might be a controversial take, but for any tightly integrated hardware (especially netbook/chromebook performance tier), any form of video content consumption or >2000s gaming generally mandates a manufacturing date of 2014 or newer with 64 bit support ideally.
I think if this user stuck to a terminal only or XFCE graphic interface (or something similarly lightweight) for usage in something like a server management or exclusively document focused environment, I think this would work swimmingly. But I think modern web browsing would be a bridge too far without a RAM upgrade, and with a 32bit platform, still a bridge too far.
My 2011 MacBook Pro can play super high rez video just fine… but it was over 2k USD when I got it, it had 16GB RAM, and a SSD. Dedicated video card doesn’t hurt, either. But jeez, he’s almost 15 years old.
Netbook/Chromebook performance tier
jives with my feeling. anything in the last 10 years no problem but yeah more ram the better 8gig will do but it gets pretty tight nowadays. Granted linux always does great on old hardware because the divers are usually at the best they got for that and might still get fixes were as anything windows is likely abandoned at some point.
RAM for sure. My wife's laptop is a 2010 model, noe running NixOS. It handles zoom calls fine, and she does her spreadsheets, email, and web browsing. But its 8gig RAM.
I recently slapped linux on an old (10 years or so) chromebook and you're right. It's a....process to say the least.
what's it good for? not much. It flips around so you can use it as a tablet/touch screen but my god was that like almost a days worth of tinkering to get working correctly. if you flipped the screen over to make it a tablet the screen wouldn't rotate correctly. lots of adjustments just to get it to work. Also you have to keep in mind the storage you have available. mine has all of 16gigs.
So what's it good for? a glorified terminal station that can SSH into my server. I initially went with XFCE but after awhile I figured even THAT was overkill as all I was really using or could use was the terminal. So I slapped Cagebreak on it (honeslty could have just gone with Cage) and use it as a simple termnial station and a glorified jellyfin client via jftui.
Was it worth it? no, but it was more of a hobby project and nothing that I would ever consider as a daily driver at all. It's just an old POS chrome book I can use while laying in bed to watch a movie or tv show from my server and mess around in the terminal.
2012-2013 laptops can be faster than 2014 because that's the time when Intel was introducing the slower U series cpus
Try AntiX, but don't expect magic, especially when it comes to browsing the modern web.
AntiX runs quite well on my late 90s PC, and it's just a Debian-based distro that still uses the Debian repos, but is optimized for extremely low spec PCs.
The modern web, especially with all of its JS and more modern video codecs, will be quite the struggle to run. YouTube still has support for h264 streams, so you can try downloading the video and using a local video player to play it, if you can get the h264 stream and your hardware has hardware decoding support. Not sure what codecs Peertube uses.
Is Peertube playback more efficient than YouTube on older hardware?
Not sure about video playback, but I feel like the PeerTube website is much more efficient. The YouTube website is amazingly badly coded...
This stream at least looks to be h264 only, which is more likely to be hardware decodable with older hardware than the vp9/av1 that Youtube usually uses.
Probably not
The issue is that the GPU is to old to support modern codices