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Yeah. Gotta find a distro soonish. My 3-4 year old laptop tried to update to W11 and has failed twice. Guess it doesn't meet the hardware reqs. (Thank you RNGesus)
Currently writing from a Mint laptop, works perfectly with minimal setup and no command line whatsoever, the only annoying thing is that the caps lock key behaves differently. Though Linux's reputation is that it can probably be modded out.
I also installed Diodon to recover the cool clipboard function that Windows has.
I could probably get the customizeable start menu, but i actually don't miss it that much
Can I "emulate" like Windows98 UI while keeping all the new functions?
absolutly, for win 95 there is a xfce (like xubuntu or mint xfce) Theme called "chicago 95", not sure about 98 tho
95 is just as good. I just really like that old ass UI. Nostalgia ya know?
A default install of Linux Mint Cinnamon has a classic windows layout of a taskbar and start button.
But things like searching and updates actually work smoothly and quickly.
I don't know, but Linux’s reputation is that it can probably be modded out.
Another recommendation for Linux Mint here. Just live boot off a USB drive and try it out. Maybe dual boot for a while if you’re unsure about just getting rid of windows cold turkey.
I use it daily on my work machine (2 year old Dell laptop) and it feels pretty flawless and polished. Even for basic desktop stuff I like it better than windows, but then all the techy Linux shit it’s still there if you care to use it. I use this “user friendly” distro to stare at plain text in monospaced fonts all day, usually between source code files and command-line stuff.
Ignore everything else, go linux mint.
I can vouch for mint, I picked it up recently after not touching Linux for almost 20 years and it was very intuitive and Windows-like. Haven't dug very deep into it yet but it was at least easy to setup and get the necessities working
Dude. I have a 2002 Dell laptop with Mint 16 on it.
It's completely unusable. Takes like 10 mins to open a browser. But it fuckin' works. Its incredible.
For something that old, you should try Q4OS. It's a Debian-based distro like Mint, but it's designed for stability while using the absolute minimum resources.
I recently installed it on a gateway laptop that's at least 20 years old. I didn't try streaming video or anything, but just opening the browser and looking at wikis was a perfectly normal experience. I dare say that laptop is working better now than when it had Windows XP.
Any distro will do. I suggest using one that has a complete installer like Mint or OpenSuse and then use KDE Plasma as desktop, which closely resembles Windows.