I know Debian and others can breathe life into older machines. But i wonder if there are any distros with serious optimizations that I haven’t heard of. I’ve already tried MX Linux on an old Thinkpad SL400, and didn’t see any difference from plain Debian.
Update: thanks for the great suggestions. Forgot to say many distros feel zippy and fast until you open a web browser. Appreciate your thoughts on which web browser to use too. So far I’ve had a positive experience with Thorium and Chromium.
What makes it lightweight when it uses the same packages with the same dependencies? And what does prevent me from install openbox on Debian?
Like I said before, it gets you started faster than doing it yourself. If you don’t want to configure every little detail yourself then these are great options to get you going.