Until recently I've been running Zorin OS Lite on it (which I love) but it seems the creaky old laptop is a bit on the slow side with it. Seems its whopping 512mb ram is the minimum required for Zorin OS lite, and it may be causing issues launching / running Libre Office etc.

Its an old Toshiba Satellite, and I mostly just use it for word processing and occasionally putting a film on in the background while im working on the other laptop and thats all I want to continue to do with it without having to wait ages for a program to load.

Having done a few searches I have found a great swathe of varying Linux and other OS intended to be fast, lightweight and so on, but I'm beggining to get overhwelmed and confused as to whats really going to be worth my time and fit my meagre needs.

With that in mind, I figured I'd ask on here - knowing full well we have some Linux enthusiasts and theres a good chance people have tried this kind of thing before.

* * * * *

What I need:

* Has to be 32bit and bootable from a USB for testing and installation. A persitant USB OS is also something I'll consider.

* Has to have some kind of word processing softtware and some kind of video player inbuilt or easily installed (the wifi on the laptop is a bit wonky at times so preinstalled is preferable).

* The laptops aged specs should be more than enough to run the OS (where with Zorin OS Lite it was the bare minimum). Specs are here.

* I wont be gaming with it most likely, so thats not an issue.

* A Linux type OS is preferred (as one day I might make the switch), but not essential.

* Quite happy to try out a good few if they fit my needs.

I have a laptop just like yours, installed Slax and Puppy Linux and both worked seamlessly. At the moment runs XP.
Antix Linux is also a option but never installed though.

Never managed to make bootable usb drives with persistence very stable, unless the whole OS is installed on the USB drive. A tool called Universal USB installer can create persistence on most live USB's if you want to try your luck.

A little rant: back when cheap Atoms netbooks were a thing, was the first time I tried any Linux distro, Puppy Linux was amazing!
Did everything I wanted and had Palemoon, wich I still use to this day in every computer...

You may consider dropping a desktop as those consume quite a lot (when talking about ½GB of RAM). I tried Linux Mint Mate for a while like that with a menu popping up with a right click. Works fine but may still not be enough savings.

Took a look at both of these. Puppy seemed a bit confusing though as it states
"Different flavours → optimised to support older computers, newer computers.
Variety → hundreds of derivatives (“puplets”), one of which will surely meet your needs."

but theres no immediate info as to what is what, and the forum didnt seem friendly to my eyes. maybe im just too used to the deathtrap dungeon of gog?! ;D

Edit: found a bit more info on Puppy variants. Seems quite a few only require 128mb ram. Still, if it comes to it i may go there.

https://itsfoss.com/lightweight-linux-beginners/

gives an overview of 15 Linux types with there min specs and all support 32-bit (to a point)

Is this a hobby project to tinker with Linux? A modern mainstream distro is going to be very slow on that hardware. I pretty much retired my Celeron M Inspiron 2200 laptop from everyday duty several years ago when its 512MB of RAM became too painful on the internet.

If you just want to use a spreadsheet and watch undemanding videos, I'd stick Windows XP SP2 on it and use a mix of period software and newer stuff that performs well.

Not really. Its so I can use the laptop for the specific purpose of writing or having films on in the background while I do other work on my other laptop. It was on XP before. XP decided the keyboard didnt work, the dvd drive didnt work etc etc etc.

Not going back there - the dvd drive is crapped out, but still works with some discs on linux at least.

However, all I need it to do is word process and play older video files (dvd quality at max). yeah it was a list like that that lead me to making this thread - once you stare into the rabbit hole it can become overwhelming.

I would try one of the distros that use the Mate or XFCE desktop as those two are light on resources. I have gotten Peppermint OS running on an old Pentium 3 laptop and it decent improvement over the version of Windows that was on it.

ill give that a look, cheers! Just tried this and couldnt get it to run beyond the initial startup - too many options, too un-user friendly (the classic "linux isnt difficult" wall of tech speak barrier). A shame as the video i watched on it made it seem appealing.

Will maybe try Slax next.

Infortunatelly, the main problem is not the lack of ram but the CPU itself, it's so painfull slow on nowadays bloated webpages. Anything that have javascript will take minutes to load and without blocking auto-playing videos and adds can crash the operating system.
It was slow even back in the day and without help of built in decoders, pretty much everything that happens in the web have to be processed by the single core cpu... Probably can't even play full HD videos (1920x1080) on the hard drive, no matter the format, not that it matters much, due the screen resolution :D It's been a while now, but if remember correctly, Slax had a website with one-click install "modules" (programs), was very cool at the time. Setup the internet access was weird and quite convoluted but once setup worked flawlessly.
First time I used Linux was with Puppy and Slax :D

Also, let me add that on the Atom powered netbook mentioned previously, any Linux distro made a night and day difference to the speed of computer, even Linux Mint... Youtube videos stuter anything above 360p on Windows, while on Linux Mint xfce could play 480-720p (720 only if the video was completely loaded), although it had 2Gb of memory....

Any thoughts on which puppy I should look at?

(this is gonna confuse people who didnt read the OP! :D).

Had a look on your links and pretty sure used both Tahrpup and Wary but can't recall wich one ended using more. After a while I did change to Linux Mint and it stay that way for a couple of years.
Ohhh, so many hours of Battle for Wesnoth played on that thing :D

Cheers. Ill give them a look after Slax.

never did get into BfW tho

IceWM sounds promising, but im not sure what you mean by "mainline"