*Security is the biggie – Microsoft have abandoned W98 and, even with all the anti-virus and firewalls you can muster, if you use the net getting some kind of infection is only a matter of time. That’s what finally pushed me to make the switch.

*More and more software no longer runs on W98, and hardware isn’t supported.

*In spite of the initial hassles, especially with the kind of stripped-down systems that old hardware runs better on, Linux is more *convenient*. No searching the net for a driver to install every time you buy a new usb drive, one digital camera interface covers everything instead of a multi-megabyte driver for each maker’s model, Ipods work without Itunes…
Also, all the handy scripts you can write to do your repetitive jobs.

*Anyway I’m posting this from a desktop with 128MB of RAM, 450MHz cpu and about 6GB of hard drive, running Xubuntu 7.04 and I’m quite happy with it. Just don’t try to do do too much at once or you’ll have to wait while the hard disk thrashes away juggling with the swap space. Firefox (Swiftweasel actually) with a dozen tabs open? No problem, as long as you’re not running a bunch of other stuff at the same time. Eventually I’ll replace it with an Openbox setup (now running on an even older laptop) for some mmemory savings and a little bit more speed, but Xubuntu 7.04 is really quite usable I think. I don’t know how much changed with 7.10 or 8.04.

The laptop: (260MHz Celeron, 192MB, 4GB) is a sort of testbed dual boot with W98 and Ubuntu 7.10 + Openbox. General speed seems about the same, startup is 2:30 for W98 (a pretty bloated installation maybe) and 1:55 for Ubuntu. Firefox comes up faster on Linux too, though again that might be because it’s got fewer extensions in.

I guess it depends on how much time you have to set up a system on those machines. (Presumably once you’ve got one done you can clone the rest.) If it’s a question of giving inexperienced users a system that’s going to be hit by a virus as soon as they start using it, you might reconsider just stalling Xubuntu one one of them and seeing how it goes.

Good luck!

On the other hand, there are a lot of distros that are much lighter than Xubuntu and will perform much better on those laptops. Keep watching; anything Linux-based will be better than an unsupported version of Windows.

And send one to me, would you? I need one for testing.

I have a stack of 10 surplus P2-333 laptops with 128M ram and 6 gig hard drives. My company was going to throw them out, so I said I would try to refurb them and donate them to a local charity.

I was contemplating trying the new Xubuntu 8.04 on them, but I see now that this will not be a vaiable option. I’ll go with the native OEM version of Win98SE on them and just install open office, firefox and some other freeware apps, plus a universal usb driver. Good enough to surf and write papers with.

I’ve come to appreciate Win98 more as time passes by (geez, did I really just say that?) – it makes you appreciate how quickly we get used to the bloat.

Peace from Canada

@Isaac: That’s PCManFM, which is my favorite file manager over Rox or Thunar or anything, really. Light, fast and does tabbed explorer windows. It’ll also handle desktop backgrounds and desktop icons, but I’m an Openbox user, so that gets in the way.

I run Xubuntu Feisty Fawn on an aging Samsung Pentium II ~333MHz w/ 256MB of RAM. While the boot time is a little slow, once the desktop has loaded the performance is very reasonable.

I’ve run Xubuntu on a 600 MHz machine with 128 meg. Way sluggish. Much slower than the 400 MHz machine.

If a machine has the memory topped out, Xubuntu will run fast enough for complete use-ability. I’d take a SWAG that 256 meg is pretty much necessary for Xubuntu. And, 400 MHz probably would be the lowest I’d recommend. But how much memory the machine has, not necessarily the processor, seems to be the biggest factor.

Today, I installed Puppy Linux for the first time (details on my blog). It’s not a speed demon either, but it keeps the little laptop working. Pretty easy to use, too.

I also agree that for older PCs, sometimes Windows 98 is truly the only option. It’s pretty snappy, and there are a lot of free software projects out there that can give it almost the same level of desired GNU/Linux functionality. It can even do slightly more than a trim GNU/Linux distribution in this proprietary binary world, but of course has the caveats that come with a Windows (especially discontinued) operating system. I’ve nonetheless tried that “Fluxbuntu” distribution out on an old Win95/Win98 laptop, and it performed moderately well.

This is slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if you could tell me which file manager is displayed in your “Most recent game” screen shot. I compared it to Nautilus, Thunar, Dolphin, Konquerpr and even ROX-Filer, but I couldn’t narrow it down. I want to say that it’s Thunar; Would that be correct?

If nothing else there are plenty of other “pure” GTK apps that don’t need GNOME libs and provide the same functionallity.