The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released an experimental version of its Linux-based Pixel OS for Windows and Mac PCs. The OS  was originally designed to run only on the Raspberry Pi hobby board, which comes with the Chromium web browser and a suite of productivity and coding tools. The OS is light enough to run most of the old machines which are having at least 512MB of RAM. 

There are plenty of lightweight Linux distros for older PCs, or we could use Neverware, which turns the old laptop into a Chromebook. However, the Pi Foundation supplies a lot of useful Linux apps with Pixel, and aims to make it as easy to use as possible. 

This is a prototype build, so expect to encounter some bugs and hardware compatibility issues. Raspberry Pi says that modern Macs will have trouble recognizing the drive as bootable, so that’s a known problem. The group thinks it could be a perfect for schools to help students learn programming and various apps. The idea is that they can learn at school, then using the persistent boot option, continue working at home with exactly the same setup.