My kids were using Zorin OS 17 on their very old Pentium laptop with 4GB of memory.

I understand that it is already an older version of Zorin. But it had started to feel very sluggish.

Kids use it mainly for browsing, but opening the browser itself takes really long.

But that is after they already wait - what feels like a long time - to see the login prompt ¹ after powering up the machine.

So today being Sunday I decided I will install Linux Lite on this machine

The latest version Linux Lite 8 is based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

At first I backed up what little data they had.

Then I booted into a live ISO version just to check out how it feels. I understand that live version is probably slower because it is running from the USB drive. But it felt OK. Not Great, okay.

I decided to gamble. It can’t be slower than Zorin. Right? It will be as slow as the existing one. So there is only upside. Let us go.

Installation was pretty much standard. Nothing to write about. I selected the existing partition used by Zorin but decided to format the partitions just so that there shouldn’t be any issues because of the previous data.

Then I took a nap while the installer was doing its thing. 💤 ²

When I woke up, installation was done, ready to reboot.

After the reboot, the first thing I noticed was I had to type in the username. No drop down available.

Okay for me, but kids might be surprised. But I think it is okay that they should get used to typing in their name. It will be helpful if and when they log into the terminal. 🤣

Then I created their logins.

There was another surprise. Light user manager is pretty much a UI wrapper on top of useradd command used from the terminal, I think.

Why do I think that? Because there is no checkbox to say this is an admin user. Instead to the right there is a list of groups, one of them being adm (Which I assume is an admin group. 🤷‍♂️)

Another thing that is going to surprise the kids is that there is no easy way to select their avatars from the login prompt. (On top of having to type in their name 😄)

But even after login, there are no pre-selected images for avatar. But, this is good. They can select whatever image they want or download from the internet rather than choosing from the limited list presented by the OS. ³

Finally, I opened the browser and logged in to the Zoom meeting that my son needs for one of his online classes.

It felt very snappy, but let us see.

For now I am happy.

Sunday well spent.