My father gifted me a second-generation Intel Core i3 Lenovo laptop with 4GB RAM and a discrete AMD GPU almost thirteen years ago. It helped me coast through school, college, and even some jobs. However, it became a slowpoke over time and even stopped supporting Windows 8 due to firmware issues, forcing me to revert to Windows 7, which was also discontinued. Chrome and other popular apps dropped support, and I upgraded to a better laptop.

My old Lenovo laptop would obviously struggle with any modern OS, so I decided to do something about it. That's when I stumbled upon the Raspberry Pi Desktop OS, a lightweight distro with a GUI that could breathe new life into my laptop. I already use the Raspberry Pi OS on my SBCs, so I thought of giving it a go on my laptop, and it worked better than I expected. Let's delve into the details and how you can repurpose your old machine with it.

Why did I pick the Raspberry Pi Desktop OS?

It felt familiar

My choice wasn't intentional, but I wanted to explore the possibility of running a Raspberry Pi OS on Intel hardware. Since the OS works on Windows and Mac and the system requirements are far lower than my laptop's, it didn't take much time to decide.

I initially thought of Ubuntu, but its system requirements have grown over time, and now it demands 4GB RAM and will undoubtedly bring this laptop to its knees. I experimented with dual-booting Ubuntu in 2016, when the distro didn't need many resources to operate.

Raspberry Pi Desktop OS is a Debian 11-based operating system that requires a measly 2GB of RAM to operate. It can now work as a basic PC for casual tasks like web browsing, media playback, and even office tasks. I understand there are other Linux distributions, some of which could work on my machine. But I was already using the SBC edition of the OS on various Raspberry Pi models and thought it would feel more familiar.

Installing Raspberry Pi OS

It’s not as hard as it seems

Not every Linux operating system follows a terminal installation route. Raspberry Pi Desktop OS offers a GUI interface, so installation isn't overwhelming. If you haven't used Ubuntu or any other Linux-based operating system in the past, the installation method seems a little different than Windows. If you plan to install it on a clean hard disk, you can go with the ‘Guided - Use entire disk’ option.

Pick the manual option if you want to install the OS on a specific partition. If it's in NTFS or any other format, the setup will convert it into ext4. Then, pick the ‘All files in one partition’ option and select the ‘Write changes to the disk’ option. You'll also see a prompt to install the bootloader, which requires picking a disk. Select the default disk on which you installed the operating system and then follow the on-screen instructions.

After a quick restart, you'll have to set up the username, add a network, and then update the system, if you like. Don't skip it because you'll have to do it later anyway. Do another restart to apply the updates, and then you’ll boot to the desktop.

The desktop experience

It's better than you expect

Raspberry Pi OS adopts a minimalist approach, whether the desktop or the SBC variant. It doesn't have a shiny UI, fancy icons, or animations, but it doesn't look prehistoric and unusable. It takes a while to accommodate the top taskbar and the apps tucked underneath the Raspberry icon. You get the Chromium browser by default, but I couldn't bear it, so I installed Chrome instead. It showed a 64-bit version available on the official page for Debian, and I installed it.

Surprisingly, hyfetch, a system monitor tool, shows the OS architecture as x86_64, and the installed Chrome browser also lists it as a 64-bit version. However, the official Raspberry Pi website that offers the distro mentions only a 32-bit edition of the OS. I even ran some other commands to reveal the OS architecture, and they showed confusing results.

Nevertheless, Chrome ran fine; browsing anything, opening multiple tabs, and watching videos worked fine. I could easily do my office tasks in Google Docs, and the included LibreOffice is more than enough for offline work.

The OS includes necessary apps like a photo viewer, VLC for media files, 2D games, and OS utilities like Task Manager, package manager, and more. All these basic operations will run fine because even ancient decade-old hardware can run these older Debian distros without sweating. But the app availability is a mixed bag.

For example, I tried to download GIMP the same way I installed Chrome, and it guided me to use Flatpak. I tried installing it and saw an error for the 'missing version of i386'. However, I could install it using apt from the official Debian Bullseye repo, but it was an older version (2.10). I even experimented with setting up Plex media server on this laptop and got it working on the first go.

The only tough pill to swallow here is that not all apps will work directly on this machine, and you might have to stick with older versions for some of them. You have to manually find the available i386 (32-bit) versions of the system from the official sites, or build them from repositories.

Still, Debian Bullseye will remain alive until August 31st, 2026, as a part of the Long Term Support (LTS) commitment. You can use it on your old PC for one more year before settling on another distro.

Revive your old PC

It was an interesting experiment that gave some purpose to my laptop that couldn’t run Windows anymore. The OS doesn’t consume many resources by default and is easier to navigate than others. It’s a perfect minimalist system for basic office/school tasks that don’t need excessive computing power. All essential utilities are freely available in the official repository, but some may require additional efforts to set up.