Flavour of LINUX for Intel Atom 10" Netbooks...?

[AJWhite1970]

I know this is a bit like asking everyone to recommend a car as there will be hundreds of different answers but I have a trolley of 30 x Intel Atom 1Gb 10" Netbooks sat rotting away in a cupboard so I was going to put LINUX on them and turn them into internet/openoffice PC's.

 

As there are hundreds of linux desktop solutions out there, what would the collected masses recommend as a small, simple GUI OS for these devices that would be not only be student proof but also PE teacher proof...?

 

Thanks

Andrew

[christhetech]

If it's simple and bullet-proof that you are after, then you really can't go wrong with either Ubunu or Mint.

[LeMarchand]

Porteus Kiosk - free and open source kiosk software for web terminals.

 

Set it so it just boots to the browser at a relevant homepage/set of pages (they'd have to use Google Docs/O365 rather than OpenOffice).

[bald_pig]

I'd say Xubuntu, you need a lightweight environment like xfce for Atom machines

[HTCPCP]

Always been a big fan of Fedora myself, and have used it on most of my home rigs for years now. Quite easy to use, and looks good. Not sure how well it would perform on an atom, but currently got it running smoothly on a Athlon 2 X3 chip

 

If you are using it in schools, https://www.skolelinux.de/en/ might be of interest for you, as it has been designed for use in schools and is partly funded by the Norwegian government.

 

Best bet is to download a load of the main distros, and use some trust worthy students to try it out, and see which one they prefer. (chocolates as a bribe usually works nicely

[CAWJames]

I love CENTOS as work, but have had Debian on my home server(which is a Wyse thin client with an AMD chip on par with an ATOM) for ages. I have now gone i3 for my new server, but Debian ran really well on the low powered thin client.

[MrBrownPr]

What about Raspberry Pi Desktop? I've used it to revive a few older laptops:

 

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-desktop/

[MatthewL]

What about making them thin clients and connecting back into a remote desktop portal if you have one?