I know Debian and others can breathe life into older machines. But i wonder if there are any distros with serious optimizations that I haven’t heard of. I’ve already tried MX Linux on an old Thinkpad SL400, and didn’t see any difference from plain Debian.
Update: thanks for the great suggestions. Forgot to say many distros feel zippy and fast until you open a web browser. Appreciate your thoughts on which web browser to use too. So far I’ve had a positive experience with Thorium and Chromium.
In earlier Q4OS versions Trinity was the only desktop environment. I still run it even though there’s plenty of power on hand to run the others. It just works.
I always have a sweet spot for KDE 3.5. I remember how responsive and tast it was on my Pentium PC some 15 years ago.
Q4OS will release an updated version within a few weeks, so if you’re interested, keep an eye on the home page’s “Latest News”.
(The developers are quite active in the forum, too.)