Except for Scotty's warning that "the dilithium crystals are going to blow", Dr. McCoy's pronouncement that "He's dead, Jim" may be the most famous Star Trek quote in popular lexicon.
And so was my nine-year old laptop: it's dead, Tom. With a hard disk that had just failed, the laptop was "really and truly dead". Dual-booting into Windows XP or Ubuntu, the laptop was a top-of-line beast when it was new, and it still performed well enough for most daily tasks nine years later.
A search on eBay and ten dollars later, my laptop was ready to go... except for an operating system. Restoring Windows XP was not an option; I'm the second owner, and I don't have the XP install disks. I was running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS at the time the old hard disk failed, so Ubuntu seemed like a good choice this time.
With a single-core AMD 64-bit processor running just shy of 2GHz and 1GB of memory, I noticed that the laptop was finding the latest browsers a handful to run. This was especially true when Mozilla dropped support for flash video. HTML 5 video requires much more resources than flash did. So, I decided to look for a lightweight Linux distribution that required less computing power than the full-blown Ubuntu distribution I was using. Anything the operating system wasn't using would be available for applications to use.
Google "lightweight Linux distributions", and you'll get dozens and dozens of results to browse through. My advice: don't over-think it. A lightweight distribution is a lightweight distribution, and the 600 pound gorilla is not the Linux distribution you choose (nor is it Windows nor macOS), it's the applications. Applications are stuffed features that you'll never use, and they get bigger and badder every release. Browsers like Firefox and Chrome are often victims of massive amounts of JavaScript and advertisements running video automatically. So, the distribution is the least of your problems, just pick a distribution and install it.
I choose Lubuntu. It's reasonably lightweight, it has access to the Ubuntu software libraries, it includes enough applications to get you started, and it's well-supported by the Ubuntu community. I installed Lubuntu 17.04 LTS, which is supported by security updates for the next several years.
I used Mozilla's Firefox browser until the most recent update that dropped support for flash. The latest Firefox browser consumed so much memory that the laptop took a deep dive into the swap space and performance really suffered. I found Opera to work much better. As a bonus, Opera includes an ad blocker that tames most ads without crippling a website's functionality.
Lubuntu includes Abiword for word processing and gnumeric for a spreadsheet. They're both lightweight applications, but if you need compatibility with Microsoft's office suite, I recommend installing either LibreOffice or OpenOffice. LibreOffice and OpenOffice share a common ancestry; either one is a good choice, and compatibility with Microsoft's file types is very good. Again, don't over-think it! Lubuntu's software catalog includes LibreOffice, so that's the one I choose. From the Lubuntu start menu, choose System Tools -> Software. If your computer is old (like mine), be patient while the software catalog loads. Then, click the Productivity button and scroll down to find LibreOffice. Installing LibreOffice loads the base product and the word processor; choose Base, Calc, Draw, or Impress to load the other features.
Finally, I found 1GB of memory to be just barely enough to satisfy the memory requirements of the most recent browser upgrades. If your system has enough memory that it is not using much swap space, you'll find computing to be much more enjoyable. If your computer's hard disk is buzzing away while it swaps programs and data in and out of memory, it's time for a memory upgrade. I found 1GB of memory on eBay for $14 that lets my system hum along nicely while barely touching the swap space. Memory upgrades can be tricky, I had good luck with a-techcomponents, a vendor I found on eBay.
Happy Computing, and Happy New Year!
