Thinkpads Forum

Im new to linux and wonder how they would run on older thinkpad models as i am planning to buy one such as a30,t23,x24......

i probably plan to maybe use federa core 5 since i heard its a popular one....

my question is that will linux runs better performance than windows xp on pentium 3 thinkpads? that is mostly general use websurfing, ms office...play dvds

Maybe, maybe not...It all depends on how you set it up to begin with.

The performance you get in Linux depends on how well you have setup your particular install and how well it works with the hardware. Memory usage, CPU usage, swap space, VM, etc...All of those matter and, to get significant performance boosts on most systems, have to be customed-tweaked depending on what you plan to run on your hardware.
For web surfing, Office (you will have to use OpenOffice or the like as there is no MS Office on Linux) and playing DVDs...there isn't much of a difference.

Linux runs just fine on the older Thinkpad models, though you might want to buy some more memory in any case to begin with. You might also want to look around and see which distro is right for you rather than going with the most popular one.