My dad's 2009 machine is running latest GNOME on NixOS. It has 2 GB RAM (+6 GB swap), some Intel Pentium CPU and Nvidia 9500GT with open-source drivers. It's perfectly usable.
I started reading the comments as the video was playing and just saw your comment here - my interest in this distro immediately dropped to zero. I build and run Gentoo Linux on many systems, including 32-bit ones from years ago, like my trusty Pentium III-based Thinkpad T22 from 2004. Gentoo runs fine on it (and other 32-bit systems I have) but, of course, the compile times are very long on such machines. I used to use 32-bit Arch on those systems before they dropped support for it. Legacy OS sounded promising until I realised how badly named it is now, and thanks to your comment.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Pentium 3 in 2004??? Surprising. I have an old 32bit Dell laptop from 2005 which uses a Core Duo, so already moved on from Pentium 4. It has Debian 32bit on it. Mostly I use it to play audiobooks and podcasts in the bedroom or kitchen.
@@MrJakeTucker It's not my only machine, I just like repairing and refurbishing old IBM and Lenovo Thinkpads - ultimately meaning banishment to the garage by the wife who didn't like tripping over the things in the house! To be fair, I still use it once a week, at least. I run Gentoo Linux on it and it has a great keyboard - I SSH into my home server to write a few scripts, have mutt email on the second virtual desktop and music playing on the third. A nice and pleasurable computing experience with no distractions - very nice!
My understanding of the save live disk changes is that if you make any changes in the settings of the live usb those changes will be brought over into the installed OS.
Thank you for showing this! I tried it in live usb mode - on old Dell laptop which came with a Broadcom wifi device - and which a number of tiny linux distros do not have working driver modules for. But legacy OS detected its wifi adapter at startup - and I was up and running with it. It really truly is legacy! Nice! Thanks. :-]
A bit curious that a low-end OS, especially one that has "Legacy" in its name is 64bit only. No love for 32bit anymore. Oh well, by this time I guess only Gentoo makes sense to install on TRULY old hardware.
@@AndersJackson I remember not long ago that 386 support was dropped. And Linus expressed hope that 486 support will be dropped soon too, in order to do some cleanup. But, yeah, Debian still has 32 bit support. And I'm pretty sure AntiX too. Surely there are others too, though, understandably, their number is dwindling. But why I said Gentoo is because of the amount you can customize it. There's a video on YT with a madman who installed the latest Gentoo at that time on a 486 in 2018 or 2019. Of course, it was compiled on another computer, but still, quite impressive.
why only Gentoo? I think you are missing interesting distros like Void Linux that does support 32bits or loc OS also Alpine Linux, even Slackware or debian and Devuan too
@@maxcontreras. Ha, correct, I am missing on those. I simply didn't had them in memory when I wrote it, and it's not something I had to dabble in recently. From your list, I know about all, except loc OS. Is that a capital i or a lowercase L ? Never heard of that one. I'll check it out.
@@Winnetou17 haha it is normal not to remember everything at the first time, "Loc-OS" is relatively new it was based on antix and MX Linux, but it was separated from this, although it takes some elements like using the init, "SysVinit" (But compiled and with a more current version) and another feature is that it uses lxde and besides apt, it has its low level package manager, and its creator Nicolas Longardi is Uruguayan, currently living in Brazil. And I am from Argentina so my English is not very good, sorry.
64 bit CPU started to come in on 2007 (The year i started with 64Bit Xeons on Intel S5000 and Other Desktop CPUs on good old "Intel Bad Axe 2" Mobo). That was abt 16 yrs back. Time flies. Peace :-)
I'm running Slackware-current on my 2006 OG white polycarbonate MacBook1,1 and it works just fine. This original first MacBook (the one with the integrated numeric keypad and user-replaceable battery) runs a 32-bit-ONLY 2.0GHz CoreDuo 'Yonah' CPU and can only be upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6.8 'Snow Leopard'. Now, Snow Leopard is still a dandy OS, though it doesn't know anything about iCloud. I'm actually dual-booting between Snow Leopard and Slackware. I keep Snow Leopard around for my old 32-bit Mac apps and I use Slackware when I need a more modern web browser than the archaic relics that Snow Leopard supports. MacPorts under Snow Leopard is giving me fits because, while it is supposed to support Intel Macs back to Mac OS X 10.6, many of the provided utilities are provided for the Core2Duo that will support 64-bit code, but my MacBook won't. Fortunately, when Slackware went to 64-bit, they released Slackware64 alongside their old 32-bit Slackware and are keeping both versions completely up to date. I don't need to run an 'old' Linux on my old MacBook.
Looks good! I saw WattOS came back from the dead in a similar vein to this and it runs really well. It's dumbfounding how Firefox runs faster in WattOS on an Intel Atom with 4GB than on modern Ubuntu flavors on modern machines. I've tried a few others like this and might have to look at this one next. Thanks!
For old computers without 32bit iso... Well... I will use WC in an other way... Maybe you can speak about archlinux32. That is a distribution for old computers.
Interesting Distro. I may have to pull out one of my old E6500's and try it. They ran well most of the time in Ubuntu 12.04, but you get a JavaScript heavy dashboard with live updates and the poor things crawled.
I haven't used Legacy OS, but I have tried AntiX. One reason systemd might be installed is because AntiX's login manager expects it to be there. For instance an issue me and many people had was that the login manager wouldn't recognize certain settings, such "when the laptop lid is closed, do X" meant nothing in the GUI, the option is simply broken. You have to use the terminal. It might be that systemd is just there to set configuration files and nothing else.
The real test would be to install it on an actual old machine, something like a single core Celeron with onboard graphics, 4GB RAM and 120GB spinning rust. But I still wouldn't choose this instead of AntiX proper
@@ghost-user559 AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 were released in 2003; Intel followed suit with Pentium 4 Prescott in 2004. I'd say 20 years is enough to be old.
@@BringMayFlowers I agree, that’s completely true, and it certainly is vintage. But 32 bit goes back to 1985. Which I’m sure we will both concede covers considerably more machines and a much greater length of time. Not that many are running anything that old, but still.
@@ghost-user559 While that's true, Linux 6.1 is the last release with 486 support, and nobody using a Pentium III/Athlon XP or older is doing so without knowing exactly what they're doing and how to do so. The most likely 32-bit generation I can think of someone trying to revive as their daily PC is maybe Pentium 4/Core Duo, or maybe a Bay Trail or Core 2 Duo running in 32-bit mode because of the 32-bit EFI. But I have a Pentium N3540 Bay Trail laptop and full-fat Fedora 37 KDE still runs well on it, and LXQt+Sawfish runs even better. As do I have a MacBook2,1 with T7400+32-bit EFI, same deal with Fedora. I definitely agree that making it 64 bit only is kind of pointless, since Fedora themselves recommend as low as an Opteron 248 with Radeon 9700, and I can believe it would run well on that. But I can't say there's no niche for it... just not one that antiX wouldn't serve and then some.
@@BringMayFlowers I didn’t get notifications for this for some reason? Yeah that’s certainly true, but I also have a relatively “new” 32 bit Acer netbook with the absolutely weak Atmos processor, and I know there are several machines that as you noted have 32 bit EFI. Although Antix and Puppy have options currently, the real joy of reviving a truly archaic machine and brining it into the modern era is something unique. More than that, I imagine anyone running something old enough to need true legacy support is either very tech savvy, as in an enthusiast, or very old and using outdated hardware, or very poor and using second hand hardware and especially in other countries that certainly is more common than not.
Puppy linux would be a better option for older 32bit machines.I have saved several old laptops from the landfill by installing puppy on them and they run great.
I think I'll stick with MX Linux as it has both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. I can replace the window manager if the old hardware needs something lighter weight than XFCE.
Bro do a Cachy OS review. Anyway im still on Fedora but use Cachy OS kernels they are neat and mentioned on the arch wiki for optimization tips. There is also a very interesting benchmark on phoronix.
Greetings, I intend to do a dual boot with legacy os 2023 and previously testing with usb-live, I cannot read the partition that I have mounted with ntfs; I don't know if perhaps by installing it on the hard disk this can be corrected. Thank you.
I'd been using Lubuntu for years but it was getting a little obese for my taste, so after a two-week trial run I finally did a full install of antiX about a month ago and I absolutely love it.
It would be fun to have a puppy linux guide. they have so many distros based of them and their site is... less than optimal to explain their differences.
libdvdcss is not proprietary or non-free software. It is free software released under a GNU GPL licence (didn't look up which version). It is also not a video codec, it gives access to encrypted DVDs that use CSS (most commercial DVDs).
My dad's 2009 hardware machine is running latest GNOME on NixOS. It has 2 GB RAM (+6 GB swap), some Intel Pentium CPU and Nvidia 9500GT with open-source drivers. It's perfectly usable.
if it's for older hardware and underpowered systems, having only a 64 bit release completly defeats the purpose. "it's for older hardware... but you totally need a new computer to run it, it won't run on your older computer". it's insane.
i've been a (very happy) full time linux user sine 2009, and yet, this is still kinda confusing, lol, so, this is like a puppy family, but it's antix, which is debian, lol.
That was the default which includes things like the ROX Desktop and Volume icon, and Conky. If you press F1 at the login screen and select the min-icewm (minimum IceWM configuration), you will get a much better number. Of course the amount Xorg takes (being the largest ram user) is going to determine the end result, but I tried it on an old Dell and it used 143MB per Htop. The version of IceWM includes tiling ability built in, BTW.
The really last manufactured Intel 32-bit "computer" I could make out was a Galileo Gen 2 (launch date 2014), hardly a deskop but an Arduino-like thing. There are some Atoms around sometimes used in older laptops or in my QNAP for instance, they date back to 2009 roughly. I don't really think 32-bit is still a thing anymore for desktop/laptop daily use, especially anything modern on browser will not work or work too slowly..
2011 was the last desktop OS CPU Intel designed, the Intel Atom Z600 series. I reckon a lot of older 32 bit systems are faster than that, though. Intel and AMD both had at least dual core 32-bit CPUs which were decent for their time. Might be a big hard to run streaming etc. but more than enough for browsing and typical workflows if you get the right software.
Nope, it's Gentoo. I can run Gentoo on anything from a Raspberry Pi Zero to a multi-CPU workstation in my home - many machines I have between those are 32-bit and Arch lost favour with me when they dropped 32-bit support a few years ago. Gentoo takes longer to compile and install but it supports many more types of architectures.
@@Wonderingax Choose what works for you - if Gentoo didn't exist I would probably be running Arch myself, to be honest. I like putting Linux on old hardware and I have never been someone that likes heavy desktops with lots of eye candy - I've always considered the "Windows Classic" GUI that was at its best by the time Windows XP came out as one of the best GUIs ever because it just lets you run your applications and stays out of the way. On Linux, I run XFCE and i3 on my own Gentoo builds and it amazes me that I can run the same GUI environment on a Pentium III-based Thinkpad T22 from 2000 through a Raspberry Pi Zero to a multi-CPU workstation. There are not many distros that let you do that.
I would be happy if they had a community edition of ChromeOS - fast boot etc esp for school kid type 2 in 1's. This way it doesn't have the stupid Google Woke Crappy backgrounds and "quotes" built in. Conky shouldn't be on a "legacy" hw imo.
15:04 and you can see why dt and all systemD fanboys are dangerous for linux... they do not really know other init systems and why typing whereis systemD shows these results and what these mean... sorry DT you do it again and again... i suggest better stay on wm's and the copy paste commands of systemD.... OTHER INITS are for real linux users!
LinuxFX is cool but you wouldn't mention it in the same sentence as legacy hardware. It's an absolute resource hog, probably due to the Windows 10 theme pack.