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.
You install and it’s lightweight and already customised. If you like it, you’re done. Gets you started much faster than customising from scratch. If you mean performance, then it’s faster because they don’t come with a full desktop environment. They’re just using the Openbox window manager. Once you get used so it it’s perfectly usable.