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?
Run a 32 bit distro. It is the only thing that will run well on 2 GB of RAM. It will run better than you think.
Q4OS, Antix, MX Linux, Damn Small Linux, and even pure 32 bit Debian are decent candidates. If you use Q4, give the Trinity desktop a shot.
I like Andelie Linux as well but MUSL may cause problems for an unsophisticated user.
I was always a fan of crunchbang when I used a couple of eee pcs as servers. It ran very light.
Probably Fedora.
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.
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.
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.
A 32 bit distro will make a BIG difference with that much RAM.
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.
Mx linux with fluxbox
Last time i searched for “lightweight” linux distros (for an old Thnkpad) the ones i saw recommended the most were: TinyCore, Puppy, Porteus, Absolute, antiX, Q4OS, Slax, Sparky, MX.
I saw Bohdi and other Ubuntu-based distros suggested quite a lot as well but my definition of lightweight means under 1GiB usage.
For a DE go with XFCE or some other lightweight DE.Puppy would fly on there, or even DSL 2024. Heck, both those distros would fly even on a Pentium 4 of all things.
But web browsers and video players are going to be painful with any distro.
You would be amazed how much 32 bit helps. If you do not open too many tabs, the web should be fine. Video no problem ( at reasonable resolutions).
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.
Q4OS with Trinity is a great pick for this user. Alpine is great but MUSL may cause problems. And I say this as a MUSL use (Chimera Linux). You are not going to find 32 but Flatpaks and Distrobox may be too complicated. So, I would stay away from MUSL based distros with 32 bit Linux on a 2 GB system.
MX and Antix are also Debian based and have 32 bit versions.
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 did not know, that background images could have this enormous effect! Good to know!!
puppy linux. ironically its made to run completely in memory but only needs like 500meg
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.
for linux and the most basic of basic tasks, i’d look at peppermint. it’s what i put on all the old crap here with ‘marginal’ specs that choke on windows. debian stable xfce based. base install is pretty sparse, not even a browser is included initially. a utility pops up after first boot to facilitate installing a browser, media player, and a few other things if you want them, or the entire debian stable repository is also available. one thing of note. with only 2gb ram, it’s gonna be tight, whatever he runs on it.
his use case is screaming for a cheap chromebook, though. so at least consider that instead. an old laptop like that might make someone a nice little pihole or something, if it’s not ready to be put down for good.
Puppy or Debian with openbox or another light wm , is crunchbang still a thing ?.
Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It’s also available with a Debian base.