What after April 2017 (end of support for Maya)?

[chrisonmint]

Here's a summary of the distro's I've looked at in recent weeks for older machines...

...
So meanwhile I'll stay with LM13 on this backup machine until I can find a newer distro. Perhaps I should add a virus/bot checker to help with security?

wow, you have been busy. If you have hardware which needs very specific software support ("old") then maybe the Arch option is the best - you could build the OS up from the basics. I hear they have a very good forum too.

The other option is to stick with what is working and stay on LM13. If you do, then minimise your exposure to the internet. I have an old iBook from 2004 which runs very well with the OSX 10.5 which is from 2007 or 2008. No updates since about 2010 so you could consider it very insecure. I removed the web browsers and turned off as many services as I can. It just runs iTunes and nothing else...

[Laugh2]

Hi ChrisonMint,
It's been an interesting project over recent weeks. Fortunately this backup laptop does these trials using Live-USBs while I'm working on other things. It's an old Acer Travelmate from ca.2004 - I really didn't expect such difficulty since LM13 installed effortlessly back then.

The keyboard may be the problem since many distributions give an "wistron_btns" error. Perhaps disconnecting the keyboard would help since I usually use a full USB keybaord anyway. There are relevant postings from that era e.g.:

• http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/dr ... ron_btns.c
  http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/dr ... e-keymap.c
  https://lwn.net/Articles/150579/
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/926012

I also found specs for the machine at http://tim.id.au/laptops/acer/travelmat ... 204500.pdf.

Since software relating to the keyboard is loaded before/with GRUB this may also explain why GRUB's character-based menu can also show jerkiness.

[Laugh2]

I also trialled Debian 8.7.1 MATE, which was very interesting.

After repeating the above wistron_btns error message for many lines over for perhaps a half hour it managed to show a graphical desktop. Mouse movements were similarly jerky to recent LM versions, however, it soon reverted to repeating the wistron_btns error message again for 5 to 10 minutes before building the graphical desktop again. It gave the appearance that is was continuously generating this error in the background even when the graphical desktop was showing.

Could this be the cause of jerkiness in all the recent distros including those which didn't explicitly show this error. If so, would solving this explain lots of the issues experienced?