On a serious note, I sometimes see low-end Win7 laptops for the price of just taking them away, them strugling with streaming lowres video on the web. What kind of modern mainstream Linux distro would make it bearable to browse forums and print text with?
At this point, I think the vast majority of performance issues would be caused by the browser itself trying to render overcomplicated javascript-infested pages, not the distro or DE. Pick any distro you want, but use a lightweight browser.
Try waterfox browser with adblocks. On linux one of the more heavy thing is the desktop manager, so maybe avoid gnome distros, cinammon is also a little bit heavy. If you want to go barebone there are many lightweight distros . Remember that you can run the distro from the bootable usb. Before install anything use the browser and check some video on youtube in full hd or even 4k.
Steaming on a web browser won’t work well, but if you can download the file and open it with mpv, or open dev tools and find the stream URL and send it to MPV then it should play fine.
Also I second xfce, any distro will do, I still recommend upgrading to ssd if you can, it’s a HUGE performance increase whatever the specks of the machine are.
On a serious note, I sometimes see low-end Win7 laptops for the price of just taking them away, them strugling with streaming lowres video on the web. What kind of modern mainstream Linux distro would make it bearable to browse forums and print text with?
At this point, I think the vast majority of performance issues would be caused by the browser itself trying to render overcomplicated javascript-infested pages, not the distro or DE. Pick any distro you want, but use a lightweight browser.
Any Linux that can run a leightweight desktop like Xfce should do it.
Try waterfox browser with adblocks. On linux one of the more heavy thing is the desktop manager, so maybe avoid gnome distros, cinammon is also a little bit heavy. If you want to go barebone there are many lightweight distros . Remember that you can run the distro from the bootable usb. Before install anything use the browser and check some video on youtube in full hd or even 4k.
Steaming on a web browser won’t work well, but if you can download the file and open it with mpv, or open dev tools and find the stream URL and send it to MPV then it should play fine.
Also I second xfce, any distro will do, I still recommend upgrading to ssd if you can, it’s a HUGE performance increase whatever the specks of the machine are.