Omega Linux revives a junk PC and is noticeably better than Ubuntu

Omega Linux is an Arch-based, lightweight distribution aimed at older, lower-powered hardware. It can run on 1GB of RAM, a single-core 1.5 GHz CPU and 15GB of storage, and ships with the LXDE desktop, systemctl init, the pacman package manager and a minimal set of apps such as Firefox, Mousepad and Vim.

During testing the OS typically used less than 1% of the CPU when idle, freeing resources for applications. LibreOffice opened in under a second, and GIMP launched in roughly five seconds on first run and about half that on subsequent launches. Those results were faster than a System76 Thelio running Pop!_OS with 32GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core CPU.

Omega is a rolling release with a minimal collection of software you can build on, but it does not include a full app set or a GUI app store. Package management requires the command line: attempts to install pacman GUIs Pamac and Octopi failed, so management is limited to pacman (for example: sudo pacman -S libreoffice).

omega linux, arch-based, lightweight, lxde, pacman, systemctl, rolling release, firefox, libreoffice, gimp