Personally, I use Xubuntu for many years; it guarantees I easily find programs fully compatible with Windows standards even if some procedures like installing fonts are longer than under Windows.

In a 20-year-old supermarket cash computer with 1 GB ram, I use Puppy just because recognizes Vesa graphic card, that Xubuntu or lubuntu couldn’t do the freezing installation. Nice, light but sometimes hard and I prefer to let it as it is. I use that pc only for emule, listen to music in the living room and backup center.

In my 20+ years of distro hopping, I found that most of the light weight distros recommended for “older computers” get that way by having features and functionality removed. I run full blown distros on all my PCs, old and new. Granted, I don’t get head snapping speeds on all of the PCs, bu then, I don’t get a head snapping speed on my latest build.

BTW – “Best” is an ambiguous term, boiling down to what the author prefers. There are too many variables to consider.

@Daniel,

It all depends on the requirements of your hardware, I use Linux Lite on my older 2GB RAM PC which runs smoothly without any issues..