Best Distro for Older hardware but still well supported?

WHat's the best DIstro for older hardware yet still well supported? ON my C2D machine it runs any distro fine...however this old P4 beast not so much.

Iv'e tried.

UBuntu (Very high CPU usage) tried with LDE installed helped a bit but CPU still erratic at times.

MInt Wasn't bad performance better than UBuntu hands down however not supported as well and i prefer the ""feel"" of Ubuntu?

Lbuntu I thought this would have been better than it was but CPU usage wise i noticed little gain from Vanilla Ubuntu.


OPen to suggestions of other DIstros to try.

Exact Machine specs are
P4 HT 2.8 (Yeah Pentium 4 that's why it's been demoted to a test machine =p)
2GB DDR

 

I'm running Crunchbang on my old P4 3.0 - 2gb. works decent.
I would also consider Peppermint, Bodhi, and AntiX.

 

Trying Xbuntu at the moment thus far it seems to be going alright,will definitely keep those in mind for next install attempts thank you. I use this old beast as a tester usually but i think i'd like to finally find/stick to one version and get to know it a bit better. Seeing as how i really don't use Windows almost at all anymore the time seems right.

 

I am running Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS on a (Do not laugh please) Dell D610 - Pentium M - (circa 2006) with 1 GIG RAM and no dedicated Video card. It ran very sluggishly until I set the default to Unity 2D 12.04 - How can I make Unity 2D the default session at start-up? - Ask Ubuntu
Psxsage; Are you using the builtin tool to determine resource usage ? (

 

I did try the 2D at startup as that was recommended by a friend..helped a little however 100% cpu utilization was still common, Yes i was using the built in tool however you could tell it was accurate (or something else was going on at the time) as at 100% CPU spikes the system was Neigh unusable. Steam/SKype installs also experienced issues under UBuntu that for some odd reason did not under Xubuntu. Perhaps i will try Ubuntu as a live USB again at some point and see if i can get a better experience but thus far Xubuntu seems to be doing the trick.

P.S i will most definitely not laugh at you i keep MANY older systems as test machines to fool around on.

JUst recently as a beater machine for my father i installed Lubuntu for my father on an old gateway Laptop with (FOrget precise specs) but around a 900 Mhz CPU 256 MB of ram and a 10 GB HD and it ran quite well considering...even recognized the PCMIA WIfi card right off the bat. Works fine for him as an exploratory LInux machine (Actually as of late he is considering me asking him to swap their primary machine over to a Linux Distro).

Using a CHromebook as my primary machine and a Chromebox attached to the TV...i figure i may as well eliminate Windows just about entirely from my lineup.

Asides from the obvious visual flair is their anything i'm missing with Xubuntu vs Ubuntu?

 

I was running Ubuntu 12.04 on my Dell D620 with 1.66ghz C2D and 1GB of RAM and it ran pretty well.

However, recently upgraded to 3GB of RAM and that definitely helped haha.

 

Your C2D would blow the 2.8 P4 out of the water however ,been debating picking up a second D630 on the cheap since my wife uses this one a lot now and using it exclusively for LInux. Could likely score another one from the local shop (if he still has any) for around 150$ with a one year warranty.

 

I have Ubuntu 12.10 running on my C2D L7500 just fine. The only changes I've made to it was to disable the Amazon spyware and added software to support my printer, some display drivers, etc. and I haven't noticed any CPU-related issues. Haven't checked if it spikes, though.

 

AntiX - install the "base" version & customise with the features you need:

 

I figure that Arch or Gentoo would also be interesting distros to look at for full control over what gets installed.

 

I tried Archbang previously & it was fast with a low memory footprint. It just requires a lot more configuration than a Debian based system.

 

I currently run xubuntu 12.04 on an Athlon XP 1800+ with a bios of 2001. It works fine with 1 1/2 GB of ram. However, I only use the thing as a media/download server. I don't really like xubuntu nearly as much as ubuntu desktop (with unity) but it is what it is.

 

I agree with Crunchbang. I've had decent results with older platforms and relatively low memory usage. Heck, I even run PiBang on my Raspberry Pi (with reasonable results). I'd say it does well in a low performance environment without sacrificing.