I found this site a while back - basically it will ask you a bunch of questions on your usage of your PC, and will came out with a list of recommended distros, and a list of reasons why YOU could like or not like it.

https://distrochooser.de/

There are some similar sites to this one, but since I’m not familiar with them, I won’t post them. They are simply DuckDuckGo-able though.

  • SnailMagnitude@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    How bad is really bad?

    AntiX is a good choice. Other option is a usb3 drive for each family member so everyone has their own portable AntiX on a stick.

    MX is the related project with a more standard install and could be worth a look, the Fluxbox option should be quite light.

    Each user could have a personal AntiX system on persistent usb3 and each system could have a bare metal MX Linux install. Just see what wins out via natural selection over time.

    LXQT is another option for a full desktop environment that will run on a potato. If family members are mainly just users and you are admin, the base OS may not matter much. They could switch between a potato running Alpine and a good system running Fedora and if they are just logging into LXQT to launch browser, office, email etc the internal system plumbing is not gonna concern them.

    • iortega@lemmy.eus
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      1 year ago

      I like your solution! Thank you.

      About my computers: I have 2 1GB RAM laptops. One has 20-25 years the other one 10-15. I have tried Puppy and antiX in these. And I personally prefer antix on them. Another 4GB laptop that might be around 8 but is pretty trash as it was a gift from our bank (it was able to run Elementary OS, it was fine). A kind of old computer but with 4GB RAM (Think I have XFCE or Cinnamon Mint on it). And a big boy with 16GB and a pretty good CPU. And the oldest computers are used the least often (maybe once a year) while the middle computer might be used 20 times a year and the last one maybe once every week.

      So I believe something like antix would work, but I’m not sure if the USB way would. Seems like they would lose their pendrives the second day.

      • SnailMagnitude@mander.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I’d put the 1gb ram laptops to server/kodi/retroarch/something mode and focus on the three decent machines for anything that requires a modern web browser, or add some ram. Porteus might be worth a shot if you’ve not tried it and want to push the Firefox on a potato idea.

        I don’t think this is a one OS fits all situation, unless maybe Gentoo.