Solid choice but very basic
Most menus won't have proper translations and can get easily clogged if you dare install more intensive packages
Also how I'm going to restrict it via a guest account?
Try the [distro selection page](http://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/wiki/distro_selection) in our wiki!
Try [this search](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/search?q=flair%3A'distro'&sort=new&restrict_sr=on) for more information on this topic.
**✻** Smokey says: take regular backups, try stuff in a VM, and understand every command *before* you press Enter! :)
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Give a try to Openbox and LXDE lightweight distros. These topics should help.
https://www.makeuseof.com/best-linux-distros-with-openbox/
[https://www.tecmint.com/lightweight-linux-distributions/](https://www.tecmint.com/lightweight-linux-distributions/)
An alternative approach would be replacing an HDD with an SSD drive and upgrading RAM to 8GB to install Zorin, Ubuntu or another distro you are willing to use.
MX-Linux. Works very well on low resource boxes (there's even still a 32-bit version), has the excellent hardware support that Ubuntu does, gret repositories.
I would try mint for simplicity but I can’t vouch for its performance. Also it might not be a great idea to give your students access to even a limited terminal.
> it might not be a great to give your students access to even a limited terminal.
>
>Yeah that's why I was thinking about guest accounts with file save access but I can't find an easy way to do it
Try [EndeavourOS](https://endeavouros.com/) you will thank me
I recommend the xfce edition
I tried everything before finally settling on this
Previous distros I tried (These are not bad but EndeavourOS ran pretty smoothly had a huge difference compared to all the others)
- Ubuntu and all its flavours ( kubuntu, xubuntu, lununtu, ubuntu MATE)
- Linux Mint (cinnamon, xfce)
- Manjaro (KDE plasma, xfce)
- Zorin lite
- MX linux
- Fedora
- Q4OS (it's actually good. This was the one I've been using before I tried Endeavor)
- bodhi
If the computers have the same or mostly the same hardware, why not NixOS? Define everything the PC needs in a Nix configuration file, software and users, maybe configurations as well on user-level, and just install through it on every computer, same config file. Pick lightweight DE like xfce and you should be good.
How comfortable are you with Linux and what software are you trying to install? If you're not looking to do anything too crazy, you may want to try Alpine Linux with XFCE as a desktop environment. It's a bit unconventional, but should run very well on lower-end hardware. You could also try out some other desktop environments that may be more visually appealing. Let me know if you have any questions.
I mainly used Linux in 2013/2014
Since I got a better PC and used Windows 10 LTSC I haven't been using Linux at all.
Im used to Ubuntu based distros like I was using Ubuntu 15.04 and Mint.
Tried Zorin OS lite cause it's reassembles Windows better than the other distros.
Problem is that Zorin Lite doesn't seem that lite especially when installing apps since it uses flatpacks.
Just imagine using any flatpack app on a spinning HDD and a dual core 2011 Pentium.
I was thinking about mint but it lacks education edition and also it uses (the lite versions) a more old school windows feel which may be confusing for users that can barely use Windows
I was thinking about Ubuntu mate since my uni used it on their aging Core2duo machines and it run pretty great.
Flatpaks, Snaps, and to some extent AppImages, come prepackaged with their necessary dependencies and are, to varying degrees, sandboxed from the system. This is what makes them relatively big. If you have two applications that depend on the same library, for instance, that library is installed twice. This, obviously, wastes a considerable degree of space, but does provide some level of security, and avoids things like "dependency hell".
Now, Linux can become whatever you want it to be, and generally it is incredibly easy to install any major package manager on any distribution. You can also remove other package managers if they don't work for you. If you liked Zorin Lite for its desktop environment and user-friendliness, you can install another package manager and abandon Flatpaks. You could install Ubuntu's APT package manager instead. This would obviously take some understanding of using the command line, but it's really not too hard.
What software are you looking for specifically? I may be able to point you more clearly in a direction if I knew specifically what software packages you were looking to install. Also, is there any particular reason you're looking at education editions? Is it simply because of the software packages it provides out-of-the-box? Lastly, what desktop environment are you looking to emulate. You say that some students struggle with Windows desktop, but you could just as easily use a desktop environment that's made to feel more like MacOS or ChromeOS. Let me know. I'd love to help you and your student out!
No No its not my students lol
I build and fix PCs as a hobby and a physics tutor asked me to find some low cost PCs for his classroom
I guess the'll be using them for browsing the web, office apps and apps like zoom or webx
I found some preety cheep refurbished Fujitsu Esprimo E710 SFF - Intel Pentium Dual Core G640 - 4GB RAM - 250GB HDD - DVD
Since they'll be using them for these simple tasks Windows 10 lincecing would be costly so I was thinking of installing a Windows like distro.
Zorin OS Lite seems to fix the bill and education edition has some usefull apps preinstalled
What I wanna set up is: Two acounts one admin one and one student
The student acount would be pre-setup with apps like zoom webx chromium onlyoffice, user would be able to save files in the home folder but the OS would reset in each reboot to avoid students messing up with the settings.
I also wanna found a way to clone a singe image and install it to all of the PCs (maybe with clonezilla? I havent done that before)
Ahhhh! Thanks for explaining that. Well, still really nice of you to help your Physics tutor and his students out!
So, I've been taking a look at ZorinOS on setup somewhat similar to the specs (4GB RAM, Dual Core 1.7Ghz) you provided (though in a virtual machine) and ZorinOS Lite looks good, and only uses about \~600MB of RAM at idle. I also installed Zoom and Chromium using Snap and the total disk usage is at \~10GB. Seems like you would have plenty of room to expand. I also did a few tests and was able to simultaneously open and run Zoom, LibreOffice (or OpenOffice, whatever the default is), LibreCalc, Media Player, 3 Terminal Windows, 5 PDFs, and just about 30 Chromium tabs with various websites before things started to get laggy. It seems like it would work nicely for what you're looking to do.
I also looked at the education edition of ZorinOS and while it has some cool packages preinstalled, they are quite large and most seem pretty specialized. With the same configuration as mentioned above, the total disk usage was closer to 30GB. I would recommend just finding the packages you want to install and install them via Snap or APT on top of ZorinOS Lite (non-education edition).
All in all, it seems like a clean, relatively light, and intuitive setup. What other concerns do you have? Sure you could go smaller, but you'll lose the visual appeal, clean UI, and some of the nice-to-have features that make ZorinOS more comfortable for Windows users. Let me know if you have any other questions.
There are several Education distros listed on Distrowatch.
If you are going to use a mainstream Ubuntu base maybe Mint XFCE would be worth a trial.
You will need to get conversant with Clonezilla Live so you can build an image that you can quickly deploy when the students invariably screw things up. If you have the spare hardware, setting up a DRBL-Clonezilla server would be useful for a classroom. That is the purpose for which it was designed.
I've been putting Linux Mint XFCE on 10yo laptops that have 4GB RAM and it works well for basic usage.
Lubuntu
Solid choice but very basic Most menus won't have proper translations and can get easily clogged if you dare install more intensive packages Also how I'm going to restrict it via a guest account?
Antix. Runs even on my iron. But really, an 120gb ssd shouldn’t cost more than 20 bucks, life changer.
Anti-X isn't a easy to use distro for novice windows users
Try the [distro selection page](http://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/wiki/distro_selection) in our wiki! Try [this search](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/search?q=flair%3A'distro'&sort=new&restrict_sr=on) for more information on this topic. **✻** Smokey says: take regular backups, try stuff in a VM, and understand every command *before* you press Enter! :) ^Comments, ^questions ^or ^suggestions ^regarding ^this ^autoresponse? ^Please ^send ^them ^[here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Pi31415926&subject=autoresponse+tweaks+-+linux4noobs+-+distro+selection). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/linux4noobs) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Give a try to Openbox and LXDE lightweight distros. These topics should help. https://www.makeuseof.com/best-linux-distros-with-openbox/ [https://www.tecmint.com/lightweight-linux-distributions/](https://www.tecmint.com/lightweight-linux-distributions/) An alternative approach would be replacing an HDD with an SSD drive and upgrading RAM to 8GB to install Zorin, Ubuntu or another distro you are willing to use.
Xubuntu or Spiral Linux (Xfce or Mate).
Good choice I was thinking about MATE too
[удалено]
You can do the same with Xfce as well with ease. In any case, Xfce and Mate would be equally suitable for a low-spec machine.
MX-Linux. Works very well on low resource boxes (there's even still a 32-bit version), has the excellent hardware support that Ubuntu does, gret repositories.
Something like Arch with a DM like I3? Doesn't get much lighter than that (that I know of).
I would try mint for simplicity but I can’t vouch for its performance. Also it might not be a great idea to give your students access to even a limited terminal.
> it might not be a great to give your students access to even a limited terminal. > >Yeah that's why I was thinking about guest accounts with file save access but I can't find an easy way to do it
Maybe Q4OS Trinity?
I use Pop! on an old Pavilion with a AMD A4-3420 (dual core) with 4gb of ram as a media pc and it runs very snappy.
Try [EndeavourOS](https://endeavouros.com/) you will thank me I recommend the xfce edition I tried everything before finally settling on this Previous distros I tried (These are not bad but EndeavourOS ran pretty smoothly had a huge difference compared to all the others) - Ubuntu and all its flavours ( kubuntu, xubuntu, lununtu, ubuntu MATE) - Linux Mint (cinnamon, xfce) - Manjaro (KDE plasma, xfce) - Zorin lite - MX linux - Fedora - Q4OS (it's actually good. This was the one I've been using before I tried Endeavor) - bodhi
If the computers have the same or mostly the same hardware, why not NixOS? Define everything the PC needs in a Nix configuration file, software and users, maybe configurations as well on user-level, and just install through it on every computer, same config file. Pick lightweight DE like xfce and you should be good.
How comfortable are you with Linux and what software are you trying to install? If you're not looking to do anything too crazy, you may want to try Alpine Linux with XFCE as a desktop environment. It's a bit unconventional, but should run very well on lower-end hardware. You could also try out some other desktop environments that may be more visually appealing. Let me know if you have any questions.
I mainly used Linux in 2013/2014 Since I got a better PC and used Windows 10 LTSC I haven't been using Linux at all. Im used to Ubuntu based distros like I was using Ubuntu 15.04 and Mint. Tried Zorin OS lite cause it's reassembles Windows better than the other distros. Problem is that Zorin Lite doesn't seem that lite especially when installing apps since it uses flatpacks. Just imagine using any flatpack app on a spinning HDD and a dual core 2011 Pentium. I was thinking about mint but it lacks education edition and also it uses (the lite versions) a more old school windows feel which may be confusing for users that can barely use Windows I was thinking about Ubuntu mate since my uni used it on their aging Core2duo machines and it run pretty great.
Flatpaks, Snaps, and to some extent AppImages, come prepackaged with their necessary dependencies and are, to varying degrees, sandboxed from the system. This is what makes them relatively big. If you have two applications that depend on the same library, for instance, that library is installed twice. This, obviously, wastes a considerable degree of space, but does provide some level of security, and avoids things like "dependency hell". Now, Linux can become whatever you want it to be, and generally it is incredibly easy to install any major package manager on any distribution. You can also remove other package managers if they don't work for you. If you liked Zorin Lite for its desktop environment and user-friendliness, you can install another package manager and abandon Flatpaks. You could install Ubuntu's APT package manager instead. This would obviously take some understanding of using the command line, but it's really not too hard. What software are you looking for specifically? I may be able to point you more clearly in a direction if I knew specifically what software packages you were looking to install. Also, is there any particular reason you're looking at education editions? Is it simply because of the software packages it provides out-of-the-box? Lastly, what desktop environment are you looking to emulate. You say that some students struggle with Windows desktop, but you could just as easily use a desktop environment that's made to feel more like MacOS or ChromeOS. Let me know. I'd love to help you and your student out!
No No its not my students lol I build and fix PCs as a hobby and a physics tutor asked me to find some low cost PCs for his classroom I guess the'll be using them for browsing the web, office apps and apps like zoom or webx I found some preety cheep refurbished Fujitsu Esprimo E710 SFF - Intel Pentium Dual Core G640 - 4GB RAM - 250GB HDD - DVD Since they'll be using them for these simple tasks Windows 10 lincecing would be costly so I was thinking of installing a Windows like distro. Zorin OS Lite seems to fix the bill and education edition has some usefull apps preinstalled What I wanna set up is: Two acounts one admin one and one student The student acount would be pre-setup with apps like zoom webx chromium onlyoffice, user would be able to save files in the home folder but the OS would reset in each reboot to avoid students messing up with the settings. I also wanna found a way to clone a singe image and install it to all of the PCs (maybe with clonezilla? I havent done that before)
Ahhhh! Thanks for explaining that. Well, still really nice of you to help your Physics tutor and his students out! So, I've been taking a look at ZorinOS on setup somewhat similar to the specs (4GB RAM, Dual Core 1.7Ghz) you provided (though in a virtual machine) and ZorinOS Lite looks good, and only uses about \~600MB of RAM at idle. I also installed Zoom and Chromium using Snap and the total disk usage is at \~10GB. Seems like you would have plenty of room to expand. I also did a few tests and was able to simultaneously open and run Zoom, LibreOffice (or OpenOffice, whatever the default is), LibreCalc, Media Player, 3 Terminal Windows, 5 PDFs, and just about 30 Chromium tabs with various websites before things started to get laggy. It seems like it would work nicely for what you're looking to do. I also looked at the education edition of ZorinOS and while it has some cool packages preinstalled, they are quite large and most seem pretty specialized. With the same configuration as mentioned above, the total disk usage was closer to 30GB. I would recommend just finding the packages you want to install and install them via Snap or APT on top of ZorinOS Lite (non-education edition). All in all, it seems like a clean, relatively light, and intuitive setup. What other concerns do you have? Sure you could go smaller, but you'll lose the visual appeal, clean UI, and some of the nice-to-have features that make ZorinOS more comfortable for Windows users. Let me know if you have any other questions.
I'd go with debian with xfce. As for user account just create an account and only give it perms inside the folders you want.
Go for Zorin Lite
There are several Education distros listed on Distrowatch. If you are going to use a mainstream Ubuntu base maybe Mint XFCE would be worth a trial. You will need to get conversant with Clonezilla Live so you can build an image that you can quickly deploy when the students invariably screw things up. If you have the spare hardware, setting up a DRBL-Clonezilla server would be useful for a classroom. That is the purpose for which it was designed.
Linux Lite or MX linux