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.
So Slackware? If you can cross-compile then maybe gentoo. I’m not sure if Raspberry Pi Desktop is x86.
I’m pretty sure you can have a minimal slack and choose xfce in the installer.
Slackware isn’t easy on resources. It needs more space than most and defaults to KDE.
Raspberry Pi Desktop does have an x86 version.