Ask HN: What’s the fastest Linux OS for a slow computer?

You need to be more specific as to what you want.

The last time I looked was a few years ago, and slackware (for CLI only) and puppylinux (very, very basic GUI with a browser) were the top contenders. But puppylinux may be too basic for you, it did not support any of the standard browsers by default and likely has some compatibility issues with some sites.

NetBSD or FreeBSD with UFS or Debain

I see a lot of people asking for a light distro and then they are disappointed because the performance is not what they expected.

When you use a modern browser, your lightweight distro doesn't matter anymore. The web stack is heavy, even if sites are coded with performance in mind.

I'm using Xubuntu and it seem to work well on a slow computer. There could be better options but my specific usecase was easier to implement with Ubuntu packages.

I tried MX Linux with additional driver support, but they didn't detect any usable screen resolutions.

The latest version of Lubuntu switched to using Qt, which isn't necessarily a bad thing out of context, but it's slower and uses more ram. Lubuntu 18 is probably the latest version without Qt. For more context, Qt is probably something you should use for a general application, not for an OS GUI or default OS apps.

I settled on Ubuntu Mate which is the lightest Ubuntu I am aware of, and I've generally been happy with it for last decade.