Installing Xubuntu Bionic Beaver OCT 2022

I am running an old Acer laptop from around 2006. I have 3GB of RAM with a dual-core Intel processor.

I was running Windows 7 up until a month ago, and I thought that I would switch to Linux to hopefully give the machine a new lease on life. I have tried both Lubuntu 22.04 and Xubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish).

I am sad to say the switch-over has been frustrating. The main problem that I am having is random freeze-ups of the system. I researched a little into this and some reported that hardware acceleration in Google Chrome was the cause. I disabled hardware acceleration and while the problem still occasionally happens, it is much less often. I was thinking that it might be related to the graphics card in the laptop, a GeForce 9300m GD.

I also find that the power savings settings appear to have no affect at all.

I would like to try an older release to see if this will play more nicely with my older machine. I had some security concerns at first, which is what have stopped me from doing this already. Today, though, I noticed that LTS distributions of Ubuntu have support for five years, and an additional five years with a subscription.

What I would like to know is: would it be wise to install either Lubuntu or Xubuntu 18.04.06 (Bionic Beaver) on my laptop?

Thanks very much for reading and for any help and advice.

Be aware that flavors of Ubuntu (such as Lubuntu, Xubuntu & all others) only have 3 years of support for LTS releases; thus the oldest supported is Lubuntu 20.04 LTS, Xubuntu 20.04 LTS etc.. For Lubuntu links are https://lubuntu.me/bionic-eol/ and https://fridge.ubuntu.com/2020/08/14/ubuntu-18-04-5-lts-released/ (where you'll note the 3 years for all flavors). The same applies to Xubuntu & other flavors too.. and if you look at 18.04.6 release annoucements you'll note none are mentioned, nor any ISOs with those fixes.

Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, and Ubuntu Base. All the remaining flavours will be supported for 3 years.

I'll also provide a link to Lubuntu's discourse (https://discourse.lubuntu.me/t/lubuntu-18-04-lts-end-of-life-30-april-2021/2466/4) where I'll refer in that thread to using ubuntu-support-status to verify what parts of your system are still supported; that if your device is x86 32-bit only (i386 in Debian/Ubuntu terms) you have no choice. If you use later releases, ensure you apply swap appropriately for your device (for some releases of Lubuntu you'll need to tweak the installed image on your box as per documentation!) I've primarily used Lubuntu as example, links etc. apply to all

No flavor packages get security fixes beyond the 3 years for LTS; so ESM/UA/Ubuntu-PRO will not provide additional security... Also as for what's supported with Ubuntu Desktop I'd recommend you look back at prior LTS releases that moved to ESM as examples... ie. yes it provides longer security; but it's only most of the packages on Ubuntu Desktop ISOs, with some deb packages only provided security fixes if converted to snap packages as per 16.04 for example.. ie. read the print (it's not even small! but should be read regardless as you should never assume)

I perform QA-testing of Lubuntu releases up to current kinetic (what will be Lubuntu 22.10 when released later this month) and other flavors to including Xubuntu, with boxes as old as from 2005. An example includes

lenovo thinkpad sl510 (c2d-t6570, 2gb ram, i915)

which is far from the oldest, but most have RAM expanded; that device has not. I used older devices up to 19.04 too, but those devices were i386 or 32-bit x86 only, and were abandoned by Ubuntu after the disco (19.04) cycle (meaning 18.04 or bionic is the last supported release if using one of those).

With your limited RAM; ensure you chosen apps match the Desktop you'll use, ie. you want the desktop & apps to share resources, so you're not requiring multiple libs to co-exist in RAM wasting resources so you can use a DE(sktop) & apps that use different libraries/toolkits. Also ensure swap is set appropriately; this is very important for Lubuntu releases using the calamares installer, which has different defaults to flavors using ubiquity (Xubuntu uses ubiquity). The Lubuntu discourse has pages on this, and the really help when RAM is limited (ie. less than 5GB)

No flavor has support for Ubuntu specialist snap-only year products, ie. 16, 18, 20 & 22; desktops are provided only for the year.month products, ie. releases using the year.month format; 20.04 & 22.04 being the supported releases

Also note Lubuntu 18.04 LTS was the last release of Lubuntu using the LXDE desktop, thus all upgrades will require re-install of later products (ie. 18.10 or later use LXQt & you risk breaking your system or a less than ideal experience if you don't clean install). This makes Lubuntu 18.04 LTS installs a less than ideal situation if you intend keeping the device for anything but a short period.