Friend has an old laptop with windows 10 that he doesn’t use because too slow and freezing all the time. Wants to revive it to leave at his lab in grad school for browsing the internet and editing stuff on google docs so he doesn’t have to carry his newer laptop everyday.
I suggested Linux but I myself always used Debian and I am not sure it will run decently with such low specs. Was thinking maybe Debian 11 with xfce or something? Any better options?
I run a debian + gnome on a 2gb ram 2in1 tablet. I am using it mostly to read manga in komikku Sometimes the desktop enviroment just stalls for 15s-120s. After couple of days of uptime. Then I usually just restart it with ssh connection or phisical button. The zram and 8gb of swap space helped with stability.
To be honest, I wouldn’t on a 2Gb laptop. It’ll run Linux just fine but the minute you use a browser or office suite you’ll have memory problems.
Maybe he’s going to run Links and Wordstar!
This!
Even 4GB RAM is low for web browsers and they’re gonna struggle, A LOT, even with just one tab open, is going to be painfully slow to not want to use it anymore.
Old laptops like this, don’t have hardware video decoders for YouTube or any video in AVC or HEVC códecs that is used everywhere today.
You can use Gnumeric for spreadsheets and Abiword for docs if Libreoffice is too slow.
As another said on the thread — it’s not really Linux that is the issue here as much as the internet. Browsers are just memory hogs now and you’re not going to get an enjoyable experience on 2gb of ram imo, if the goal is to have a functional laptop. OTOH, it would be a great little project server to play around with things like pihole or your Arrs🏴☠️ or other self hosting goodness.
Your biggest problem is the amount of RAM, not the cpu. Some Linux distros would fit nicely on 2gb with a few native apps open, but the moment you’d want to browse the web, all hell will break loose, as each tab will take hundreds of megs each (youtube takes between 600 and 1200 mb of ram). FYI, even if chrome/ium is hated in these parts, it uses less ram than firefox (there’s also a setting to use even less ram).
I’d suggest you use either Alpine Linux with xfce (240 MB of RAM on a cold boot), or even better, Q4OS with the Trinity Desktop (fork of KDE), 350 MB of RAM. The advantage of Q4OS is that it’s a debian, so it can run lots of .deb files made for debian. Alpine is cool and all, but it has bugs on the desktop (some of its package management has dependency problems).
A tip: to save ram, don’t use background images, only a single color. You can save up to 50 MB of RAM that way, depending on the image you’d be using.
I did not know, that background images could have this enormous effect! Good to know!!
I agree the question here is not so much which distro but which browser.
Todays low-end laptops often come with 8 GB of RAM. Even common phones have more than 2 GB of RAM.
I was always a fan of crunchbang when I used a couple of eee pcs as servers. It ran very light.
Is Crunchbang still maintained?
Not exactly, when Crunhbang development ceased Crunchbang++ aka #!++came out and that distro is currently maintained. As far as I can tell #!++ is more of the same, which is a good thing. I had to retire my tired old eee pcs a long while back, so the NUC I replaced it with was fine with standard Debian since it had 16x the ram.
Crunchbang was amazing, but it’s sadly no more. Development stopped on it some time in 2015 I think.
Bunsenlabs is a direct successor to it, and should be good on OP’s system.
puppy linux. ironically its made to run completely in memory but only needs like 500meg
Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It’s also available with a Debian base.
Probably Fedora.
Debian, lxqt and x11.
If you can get an ssd in there then there’s some zram or something or other that can make it even better.
The most important thing is not the distribution, but to enable ZRAM (or ZSWAP) and use a lightweight desktop. I am not sure how much difference a 32bit vs a 64bit distribution makes, but if possible you could take one for the team and run some trials and report your numbers (RAM usage) back here.
Of course I recommend Debian with a lightweight desktop of your choice, or Alpine.
I’m not sure that cpu will be able to handle memory compression with a usable speed. I would expect it to make it even slower
Mx linux with fluxbox
Windows 10 has a bug with 100% disk utilization that goes away if you have an ssd. You should look into upgrading the ram to 4 or 8 gb. ddr3 ram is dirt cheap on ebay. It would probably cost $10-$15 for 8gb and another $10 for a 120gb ssd.
honestly the distro doesn’t matter so much as long as the hardware i supported. run a minimal desktop, disable CPU hogs and file indexing etc.
I used fvwm on Debian for many years on old computers. worked great. now I have kde/plasma on arch. my 10 year old laptop handles it fine…
disable CPU hogs and file indexing etc.
Do you have some tips for that?
Mint.
It’s extremely stable Linux for your grandma, that comes with every tool that she will ever use and on the cinnamon interface all those tools are exactly where she will expect them to be if she is used to using Windows.
I’ve gotten three boomers to use it and they hardly ever ask for tech support because it’s so stable.
Linux Mint Debian Edition: xfce, Firefox running, 12 tabs open, just under 3GB utilized. All my usual stuff open too, Telegram, Next cloud, etc.
I bet you’d be good with it and an SSD and a bit of swap. (I have no swap used.)
alpine
