Linux made my old PC fast again, and it hasn’t slowed down since

You might have heard that Linux has a reputation for breathing new life into old computers, but that’s not all it can do. It can also make your current PC stay current for longer. Here are the many ways Linux keeps my computers running like new, year after year.

My old PC can’t run Windows 11, but it runs Linux like a breeze

The reason I switched from Windows to Linux in the first place is that one of my old computers couldn’t run Windows 11 properly. Its fans would stir up a storm even when the PC was idling. Windows 11 was hogging more than half the memory and just as much of the CPU. It was practically unusable because the lag was so bad.

Instead of chucking it, I decided to install Linux on it. Prior to that, I had dual-booted Linux, but I had never used it on a daily basis. This was the first time that I decided to go all in on Linux.

I wiped Windows off the PC and replaced it with CatchyOS, an Arch-based Linux distribution. I had only used Debian or Ubuntu systems before that, so it was to be a learning experience for me. Since I was going to have a learning curve anyway, I decided to set up a tiling window manager as well. I had been meaning to try one, and it seemed like the perfect time to do so. I chose Hyprland as my window manager and installed it alongside CatchyOS.

Right away, my PC’s fans went quiet and have stayed quiet since. CatchyOS barely uses any resources when idling, and I can run pretty much all my apps without experiencing any lag.

Arch Linux is always updated and current

I purposefully avoided Windows updates because it’s so inconvenient to install them. I just wanted to get my work done without sitting and waiting for an update to complete, so I turned off feature updates and only ever installed security patches. While the security updates kept the PC safe, my update model definitely didn’t give me the latest software.

Linux solved that problem for me because it handles updates differently. For one, you, the user, get to decide when to update. You can also keep working while the updates run in the background. Since CatchyOS is based on Arch Linux, it’s a rolling release distribution.

A distro that follows the rolling release model only has one version, and it’s always the latest one. All you have to do is run this one command and all the packages on the machine are upgraded to their latest versions.

sudo pacman -Syu

I have made it a habit to run this command at least once a day. That way, I always have the most cutting-edge software available.

I can run modern software on old hardware

I have a couple of old, heavyweight Dell Latitude laptops from 2011 lying around the house, but they’re too old to update to modern Windows. They came with Windows 7 and modern apps don’t run on Windows 7. It’s hard to even get a decent browser running on Windows 7. Linux not only supports these old computers, but there are Linux flavors purpose-built to revive old computers.

I’ve tried installing a few of those lightweight distros and almost all of them immediately revived these computers. I didn’t even run into any hardware compatibility issues, except for Puppy Linux. AntiX, PeppermintOS, LXDE, and Tiny Core ran perfectly. My 15-year-old computers now run almost everything a modern Linux machine can.

Linux systems don’t degrade as quickly over time

Windows systems get bloated over time, especially if you install games and apps often. When you uninstall apps, they often leave ghost files and processes behind because Microsoft makes the developers responsible for building uninstallers for the apps. The central Windows Registry also grows bigger and more cluttered with time. It’s why Windows feels like it slows down the longer you use it.

Windows also doesn’t do a great job of cleaning up after itself, so temporary files and botched updates degrade its performance over time.

Linux, on the other hand, uses robust package managers like Pacman or APT. These package managers are responsible for installing, updating, and removing user apps and system packages. They don’t leave any “ghost” files behind. There is no centralized “Linux Registry” either.

Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek

Also, Linux uses more modern file systems like ext4, which don’t suffer from the fragmentation of NTFS.

It takes fewer resources to run the OS itself

Largely speaking, it takes fewer resources to run Linux systems. While Windows takes around 4GB of memory, even when idling, Linux systems can idle at 1GB or less. The lightweight distros I mentioned can idle on as little as 200MB of RAM. These operating systems also take up fewer CPU resources when idling.

That’s not to say that they don’t take up the same amount of resources when running your apps. For example, if you launch a lot of browsers with a lot of tabs, the browser will eat up just as much RAM as it would have on Windows. That being said, the overhead for the operating system itself is much lower on Linux. That smaller overhead can extend the life of hardware components.

Where Microsoft is pushing to turn millions of fully functional PCs into e-waste, Linux is doing the opposite. It has saved so many of my computers from the landfill and the best part is that they run better than they ever did on Windows.