Hi all, the private school I work at has a tonne of old windows 7/8 era desktops in a student library. The place really needs upgrades but they never seem to prioritise replacing these machines. Ive installed Linux on some older laptops of mine and was wondering if you all think it would be worth throwing a light Linux distro on the machines and making them somewhat usable for a web browsing experience for students? They’re useless as is, running ancient windows OS’s. We’re talking pre-7th gen i5’s and in some cases pentium machines here.

Might be pointless but wonder what you guys think?

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    10·
    5 months ago

    The biggest demands will come from the browser and its media players, not the OS. An i5 with 4gb RAM will be ok. Anything less will be marginal or worse. The modern web sucks. Did you know that mobile phones are starting to come with cooling fans? OMG.

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      There are very lightweight media players available that will run on anything with enough CPU power to decode whatever codec you are playing. It’s modern web browsers that will be an issue with less than 4GB of RAM. There are lighter web browsers, but they usually don’t support javascript or have very limited support for it.