Bodhi Linux on an old laptop.

[wove]

I found an old 2009 C2D non functional lap and was able to bring it back to life. Looking for an age appropriate yet modern distro I installed Bodhi Linux on it. It is a very convoluted desktop on which at this point I can not do much of anything without referring to the manual.

It is a small distro, with including just the bare basics. They do have meta packages available to add applications one might need for specific use cases. The install was fast and painless. I does have enough similarities to other systems to get you going, but it also has enough oddities to get you confused very quicky.

However it is a very fast and responsive system with amazingly low resource usage. I am up running with Firefox visiting here, Rhythmbox playing some internet station. htop in the terminal says both cores are running between 5-8% and a whopping 725MB of ram are being used.

I gather from the forums that most users are on equally low resource systems. It looks like people like to use it mostly for graphics work. If you are a starving artist, with a hand me down or flea market machine it is just the ticket to pull some heavy applications. Most starving artists I know are quirky enough to find the UI a free wheeling delight.

[crosscourt]

I used Bodhi for quite some time back in its early days with Enlightenment. When the founder came back and things changed, I found Moksha, the fork of Enlightenment, wasnt to my liking and I didnt stay with it.
I tended to go to distros like LXLE and Wattos that used LXDE which I found more to my liking and even lighter than Bodhi is today. Antix is also a great choice for older systems.