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?
Raspberry Pi OS or antiX.
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.
puppy linux. ironically its made to run completely in memory but only needs like 500meg
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!!
Fedora.
It seems to be easy to manage and fast to install.
SUSE is slow to run and self-update.
Debian is far behind and Ubuntu seems to always have an issue during or right after installation.
alpine
Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It’s also available with a Debian base.
VoidLinux
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?
Upgrade that box or repurpose it for something else. Web bloat has made 2gb machines useless for browsing and 4gb marginal, if the user needs Google docs, put in 8gb or more.
There are plenty of distros for very low end pcs, but they tend to require more tech skills to use. I have experience with a friend in a similar situation. I installed with mx linux for her and she is liking it. The performance is pretty reasonable and it comes with various tools that make it easier for people with less tech skills. The only extra thing I did was install the 32 bit version of firefox, because it makes a huge difference in low ram devices.
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.
I think antiX would be a nice option. I installed it on a 20 years old laptop and it runs quite fast.
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
If your friend is not tech savvy person, i would go with Mint XFCE (maybe Zorin OS Lite). Surely, it will be not as lightweight as Debian, but it will be much more user friendly for him
If he actually feel comfortable tinkering with OS - along side Debian maybe Bodhi Linux or antiX? I tried both of them on one of (in)famous Intel-based netbooks with 512mb RAM and they worked quite well.
