When I started out, I used red hat, Suse linux, and then finally I jumped to Ubuntu, when they killed gnome and rolled out their new GUI later, I switched to Ubuntu Mate, with xfce alternatively installed. And then later came MINT. Which is based on ubuntu anyway. Source: 6 months ago

Prepare a blank USB stick with a copy of Ubuntu (write the ISO to the USB stick with Rufus). Source: 6 months ago

Ubuntu MATE (simple, well maintained, has the Ubuntu ecosystem support and should work well). Source: 12 months ago

Linux Mint has its advantages, but your title doesn't make sense when there's Ubuntu MATE. Source: about 1 year ago

(btw: since the PC is older I would reccommend Ubuntu Mate or Xubuntu as those come with a lighter Desktop). Source: about 1 year ago

Dietpi[0] is pretty good (debian-based) distro that works out of the box with minimal configuration. It was originally designed for a RPi's (I think), but it's expanded to tons of other devices. Here you can see a benchmark of each supported device and decide yourself what you want to go for[1]. 0: https://dietpi.com/#download 1: https://dietpi.com/survey/#benchmark. - Source: Hacker News / 5 days ago

The full release notes can be found at: https://dietpi.com/docs/releases/v9_1/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

That's a good point, but the array of devices supported by the DietPi team is extensive: https://dietpi.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

I used dietpi [1] for similar reasons: a slim version of Debian, and with the defaults set to push all the logging into ram to minimize writes. Dietpi has opinionated defaults, for sure, but it's easy to choose something else (e.g. Dropbear is the default ssh server, but bumping to OpenSSH is a matter of changing a setting in the handy config tool). I've been running an RPi3 on an SD card as my secondary PiHole... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

Before someone starts the usual yadda yadda about the RPi biger community, the OS not having long time support etc. I would repeat one more time: do not rely on board vendor supplied images; this is valid for pretty much all boards. Just go to Armbian or DietPi pages and you'll almost certainly find one or more images that work on your board and forums to discuss about them with very knowledgeable people.... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago