Arduino Nano - programmer is not responding
For me the problem was the selected "processor" type.

I had to change it to 328p (old bootloader).

Also, raise the IDE's verbosity, in order to have a nice progress bar when loading the sketch.

My specs:


OS: Linux Mint 18.3
Linux kernel: 4.13.0-37-generic
Arduino IDE: v1.8.5
board: the cheap and common Nano Chinese clone
USB to serial chip: CH340