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?

  • wolf@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • gi1242@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    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…

  • muhyb@programming.dev
    0·
    1 month ago

    I think antiX would be a nice option. I installed it on a 20 years old laptop and it runs quite fast.

  • banazir@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 month ago

    With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It’s a really light distro.

  • Gayhitler@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Debian can be pretty light/small on a clean install and xfce should run fine on 2gb. Although the biggest thing is gonna be if the laptop has fast storage or not. Since its a celeron it might not be upgradeable, and if it doesnt already have an SSD any desktop will feel slow

    Personally if I really wanted to squeeze all the performance I could for web browsing I’d go with minimal Debian and RiverWM but thats a bit more involved

  • notagoblin@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I put Antix on a 2Gb 64bit HP Atom. Worked well for notes and browsing. Oddly an SSD seemed to make little difference to performance compared to the previous HDD. Old architecture I guess.

  • Petter1@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 month ago

    My friend always recommended puppy linux fur such devices, he was very happy with it

    I personally think alpine might be a good fit, it is very lightweight. It does not use systemd though and is therefore in many ways different than most distros(for some this is a good thing). I know it from postmarketOS (optimised for phone hardware)

    Other than that, you may just take Arch, as it comes pretty minimal and you can choose for every package to use the most lightweight solution

    Or you can go even more personalised with gentoo, linuxFroScratch or yocto. Just requires some skill, but skill can always be acquired by learning and doing.

  • Gutless2615@ttrpg.networkEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • zod000@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 month ago

    I was always a fan of crunchbang when I used a couple of eee pcs as servers. It ran very light.