Sometimes its hard to replace some of our old stuffs — like our first PC.
Most of us still uses our old PC even if it can’t run new operating system. But luckily some Linux distributions out there are suitable to power up your old buddy.
But having a good lightweight Linux distro can’t guarantee smooth and faster Linux experience, since you use different other programs which utilizes more RAM. However you can speed up your old Linux PC by using it with some lightweight Linux software.
In this article we are going to list some lightweight Linux programs that will power up your old or low configured Linux computers.
Lightweight Linux Programs To Speed Up Your Old PC
| Lightweight Linux Software | Description |
|---|---|
| Audio Players | |
| Ario | Ario is a GTK2 client for Music player daemon. |
| Pragha | Pragha is based on Gtk, sqlite, and completely written in C, constructed to be fast and light. |
| Audacious | Audacious plays your music without stealing away your computer’s resources from other tasks. |
| DeaDBeeF | DeaDBeeF is an audio player for GNU/Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, Mac OS X, and other UNIX-like systems |
| Cmus | cmus is a small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems. |
| cplay | Limited music player written in bash using mplayer features: search/play music, colorized output |
| MOC | MOC (music on console) is a console audio player for LINUX/UNIX designed to be powerful and easy to use. |
| QMPDClient | QMPDClient is Qt4 based mpd client features : Covers’ display, Lyrics’ display, Tag guessing, Internet radio and lots more. |
| mpg123 | A fast free MP3 console audio player for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Hpux and near all other UNIX systems. Also decodes mp1 and mp2 files. |
| Browsers | |
| Midori | Midori supports many of the most popular parts of the web along with built-in privacy tools, including script disabling, third-party cookie blocking, stripping referrer details and automatic history clearing after a set amount of time. |
| Vimprobable | Vimprobable is a WWW browser that behaves like the Vimperator plugin available for Mozilla Firefox. It is based on the WebKit engine (using GTK bindings) |
| surf | surf is a simple web browser based on WebKit/GTK+. It supports the XEmbed protocol which makes it possible to embed it in another application. |
| Arora | Arora is a cross platform web browser built using Qt and WebKit. |
| Conkeror | Conkeror is a keyboard-oriented, highly-customizable, highly-extensible web browser based on Mozilla XULRunner |
| Dillo | Dillo is a multi-platform graphical web browser known for its speed and small footprint. |
| ELinks | ELinks is an advanced and well-established feature-rich text mode web browser, which is portable and runs on a variety of platforms. |
| rekonq | rekonq is a web browser for KDE based on WebKit with nice minimal look, lightweight approach and have advanced features. |
| NetSurf | NetSurf is a multi-platform web browser for RISC OS, UNIX-like platforms (including Linux), Mac OS X, and more. |
| Hv3 | Html Viewer 3 (hv3) is a powerful yet minimalist web browser that uses Tkhtml3 as a rendering engine and SEE (Simple ECMAScript Engine) to interpret scripts. |
| Email Clients | |
| Trojitá | Enables you to access your mail anytime, anywhere without slowing down your pc. |
| Alpine | Alpine is a fast, easy to use email client that is suitable for both the inexperienced email user as well as for the most demanding of power users. |
| Sup | Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of ema |
| Mutt | Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems. |
| Claws Mail | Claws Mail is a user-friendly, lightweight, and fast GTK based email client. |
| Sylpheed | Sylpheed is a simple, lightweight but featureful, and easy-to-use e-mail client. |
| File Managers | |
| PCManFM | PCManFM is the default file manager for LXDE, to be a lighter alternative to Files (Nautilus) on your GNOME desktop. It features tabbed browsing and can optionally manage the desktop background. |
| Thunar | Thunar is a modern file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment. Thunar has been designed from the ground up to be fast and easy to use. |
| emelFM2 | It is a file manager for UNIX-like operating systems. It uses a simple and efficient interface. |
| Vifm | Vifm is an ncurses based file manager gives you complete keyboard control over your files without having to learn a new set of commands. |
| Ranger | Ranger is a file manager with an ncurses interface. It is designed to give you a broader overview of the file system by displaying previews and backviews, dividing the screen into several columns. |
| ROX | ROX is a fast, user friendly desktop which makes extensive use of drag-and-drop. |
| File Archiving Tools | |
| Squeeze | Squeeze is a modern and advanced archive manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment. |
| Xarchive | Xarchive is a GTK+ 2 front-end for various command line archiving tools. |
| Xarchiver | Xarchiver is a lightweight desktop independent archive manager built with the GTK+2 toolkit. |
| Image Editors | |
| Fotoxx | Fotoxx is a free open source Linux program for image editing and collection management. |
| mtPaint | mtPaint is a painting program from scratch that could easily create pixel art and manipulate digital photos. |
| Image Viewers | |
| Mirage | Mirage is a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer. |
| GPicView | GPicView is a simple and fast image viewer for X. Made by the developers of LXDE. |
| QIV | Quick Image Viewer is a very small and pretty fast gdk/Imlib image viewer. |
| GQview | GQview is an image viewer for Unix operating systems (developed on Linux). It’s key features include single click file viewing, external editor support, thumbnail preview, and zoom features. Some image management features are also included. |
| Geeqie | Geeqie is a lightweight Gtk+ based image viewer for Unix like operating systems. |
| Login Managers | |
| Qingy | Qingy is ultralight and very configurable graphical login independent on X Windows. |
| CDM | CDM provides an ultra-minimalistic, yet full-featured login manager written in bash. |
| PDF Tools | |
| Xpdf | Xpdf is a viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. |
| Terminals | |
| LilyTerm | LilyTerm is a terminal emulator based off of libvte that aims to be fast and lightweight, Licensed under GPLv3. |
| st | st is a simple terminal implementation for X. |
| ROXTerm | ROXTerm is a terminal emulator intended to provide similar features to gnome-terminal, based on the same VTE library. |
| Xterm | The xterm program is a terminal emulator for the X Window System. |
| RXVT | RXVT is a terminal emulator for X11. It is a popular replacement for the standard ‘xterm’. |
| Text Editors | |
| Leafpad | Leafpad – GTK+ based simple text editor |
| ACME | Acme is a powerful text editor, development environment and textual-user-interface platform. |
| Vim | Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient. |
| Beaver | Beaver is an Early AdVanced EditoR. |
| Sam | A minimalist text editor with a graphical user interface, a very powerful command language and remote editing capabilities. |
| Geany | Geany is a text editor using the GTK+ toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. |
| Medit | Medit is intended to be a useful programming and around-programming text editor. |
| PyRoom | PyRoom is a free editor that stays out your way – and keeps other things out of your way, too. |
| Torrent Clients | |
| Deluge | Deluge is a lightweight, Free Software, cross-platform BitTorrent client. |
| aria2 | aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. |
| Transmission | Transmission, A Fast, Easy, and Free BitTorrent Client. |
| qBittorrent | The closest open source (GNU GPL v2 license) equivalent to µtorrent |
| RTorrent | rTorrent client uses ncurses and is ideal for use with tmux, screen or dtach. It supports saving of sessions, allows the user to add and remove torrents and many more. |
| Video Players | |
| Parole | Parole is a lightweight and minimalist option that keeps the focus on what you’re watching. |
| Gnome MPlayer | Gnome-Mplayer is a simple GTK-based GUI for mplayer without heavy Gnome dependencies |
| SMPlayer | SMPlayer is a free media player for Windows and Linux with built-in codecs that can play virtually all video and audio formats. |
| Videos | Videos is a video playback application designed to work with GNOME 3. It’s based on Totem, the original GNOME video playback application, which has been included in GNOME since 2.10. |
| MPlayer | MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems. |
| Word Processors | |
| AbiWord | AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks. |
| WordGrinder | WordGrinder is a Unicode-aware character cell word processor that runs in a terminal. |
| Other Linux Lightweight Tools | |
| Orage | Orage is a new modern calendar application for the Xfce Desktop Environment. |
| Calcurse | Calcurse is a calendar and scheduling application for the command line. |
| Remind | Remind is a sophisticated calendar and alarm program. |
| Todo.txt | Todo.txt manages your Todo list from the command line. |
| Conky | Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any kind of information on your desktop. |
| htop | An interactive process viewer for Unix systems. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses. |
| PyPanel | PyPanel is a lightweight panel/taskbar written in Python and C for X11 window managers. |
| Docker | Docker is a docking application (WindowMaker dock app) which acts as a system tray for KDE and GNOME2. |
| Awesome | Awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. |
| Gnumeric | Gnumeric is an open-source spreadsheet program. |
| Shotwell | Shotwell is a photo manager for GNOME 3. |
That’s it for now — soon we will add more lightweight Linux programs..
And also if you know any other lightweight software for Linux please comment below.
