My grandma has a really old laptop that was bought about 10 years ago. For the longest time, it ran Windows 10, which was an absolute nightmare to use. It was very slow, and my attempts at optimization didn't do much. She was constantly annoyed by it and we even considered buying a new laptop a year ago.

However, in March 2025, as I grew more confident with my Linux skills, I thought about installing some easy to use distribution on it. No one was against this idea, since at worst I could just reinstall Windows.

My goal was to install a lightweight Linux distro that would feel like Windows, would not get in her way, and would require minimum maintenance (i'm lazy :3). I use Arch btw, but it would not be a very good idea to install it. I don't want to deal with updates several times a month, and it is not reliable enough for a new user. Of course, I then thought about Debian or Mint, and I picked Mint simply because I'm more familiar with it.

Installation

I've decided to install Linux Mint 22.1 XFCE edition, which was the newest at the time. I picked XFCE as a desktop environment because it was the most lightweight out of all options, and I didn't need any more features. After confirming that everything works in the live mode, I've installed it (which was really easy, just clicking "next" a bunch of times). After that, I wanted to make Firefox automatically start after booting. This was not hard at all, but I did have to manually enter the executable name instead of being able to choose it from the list of applications. Then I've set up automatic updates (really easy to do) and system backups (also easy with Timeshift). I've also found a desktop theme that looked like Windows 10. The whole installation and configuring process only took me a few hours, most of which I spent fiddling with random stuff.

Results

The end result is awesome! It works much faster now, the whole setup barely takes any disk space and it consumes around 700 MB of RAM without any open applications. Not to mention that I don't even have to look at the laptop - the last time I did that was over three months ago, just to make sure that everything works. I probably won't even have to look at it until Mint 22 end of support or until the HDD dies.

However, there are a couple issues that are worth talking about. The most significant one is that, for whatever reason, everything looks like it had an aspect ratio of 4:3, but was stretched onto a 16:9 screen.¹ It looks weird, but it seems to be fine for her use case. There are also a couple issues with the Ukranian translation if you dig around. However, overall it's much better than before.

tldr: lunix good widnows bad