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LXLE Linux – revive that old PC! [Freeware]

lxlelinux

Everyone’s got an old laptop or desktop PC lying around in an attic or cupboard somewhere. That’s just how it goes. Most of the time, it sits there because it runs like a dog, and no-one can be bothered to fix it, or junk it. But now you have a rather cool way to bring your old machine back to productive life.

LXLE Linux is, as the name implies, yet another flavor of the venerable Linux operating system. But with some rather neat differences. For one thing, it is specifically designed to offer a fully working ‘out of the box’ experience. That means it comes with a whole bunch of apps already included, so you can drop it onto an old computer and immediately start doing your word-processing, drawing, multimedia etc without having to install anything extra at all.

lxlelinux2

It helps that it also looks really lovely on install, and what’s more it’s so lightweight that it runs like greased lightning, even on old hardware with not much RAM memory. For most people, the fact that it offers instant install and forget is a real bonus, even things like trackpads, wireless networking and sound work instantly (which is not always the case, even with other Ubuntu based systems as this one is).

lxlelinuxDELL

We tested it out on a six year old DELL Latitude (above), and the live version installed in a few seconds. The file download is quite large at 1.3 GB (because of the all the included apps of course), so you’re limited to installing it via DVD or a USB key (no CD install possible at this size), so that immediately makes things difficult for very old machines with no USB boot, but apart from that we were very impressed by how effortlessly it installed and ran.

lxlelinux3

Conclusion
It’s not quite as beautiful as the gorgeous Elementary OS system, but on the other hand it’s designed to run on machines with as little as 512MB of RAM, which is amazing for this level of sophistication. It’s fast, stable and because it’s based on Ubuntu, it should be regularly updated. And if you’re completely a non-tech head, you can buy a DVD or USB flash drive ready to install without any downloading, from just $5.95. Very cool indeed!

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2 Comments

  • Is one advantage of LXLE Linux over ElementaryOS, is that the former has more than just photo/video/music capabilities, but also a browser?

    • Well they both have browsers. E-OS uses Midori (which personally I find totally inadequate, so I always install Chromium and Firefox immediately, while LXLE comes with the full Mozilla SeaMonkey suite, including email and browser.

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