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?
This is good RAM for any 32 bit OS which is still being maintained.
64 bit OS require minimum 4 GB.I don’t think Google will like any 32 bit device though. Go for an older version from libreoffice.
Why wouldn’t Debian run?
Debian is the OS, with its package manager and some applications suggested by default. You can install Debian with X, without X, with a certain window manager or another, etc. So… Debian WILL 100% run, the question rather is WHICH software should you pick that gives the best compromise between ease of use (specific to that person) AND performance (specific to that computer).
PS: to be clear, that’s the same for other distributions. There are distributions that specifically target older hardware and that in turn might facilitate the process but usually if you do check how such distributions are done, they are basically Debian (or NixOS or Alpine or whatever) with a specific package selection. It’s rare (if ever? counter-example) to have anything special that would somehow “boost” performance for hardware, especially here when it’s rather common hardware.
FWIW I did run on old hardware with ratpoison and had a blazing fast experience, much more responsive than “top” hardware back then. So… yes IMHO it’s about the wm/de usually, the rest follows. Obviously you can’t run super demanding software, e.g. video editing, 3D modeling, etc but that’s usually rather obvious.
Heavily customized LFS
AntiX.
Puppy or Debian with openbox or another light wm , is crunchbang still a thing ?.
Bunsenlabs is the successor to crunchbang.
Good to know. I always liked #!
Ditto, I used it on my eepc 701 way back when. I miss that sort of computing experience!
Unfortunately, modern web browsers are horrible pigs. No matter what distro you put on this thing, interacting with webpages will be s-l-o-w. (I have a similar laptop—2 GB RAM, Athlon64x2 CPU—running Gentoo, and while it’s functional in its primary job of “larger-screen video iPod for 720p or less”, starting a browser takes a while.) The niche your friend wants to make this machine fill is about the worst one possible for it.
Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It’s also available with a Debian base.
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.
Mx linux with fluxbox
Debian, gnome, Dash to Panel extension, and WinTile extension. It will feel a lot like Windows. Then add OnlyOffice since it looks nearly identical to MS Office.
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 Slitaz is still around, I always liked that for older machines, I was going to try it on an AMD C-50 laptop I pulled out of storage recently, except I don’t have time for messing around.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yup, two years ago I installed Q4OS with TDE (basically KDE 3.5) on an old Penitum 4 1.8 Ghz computer with 2 GB of RAM and integrated graphics (Intel Extreme Graphics, part of the Intel 845G/845GL/845GE/845GV chipset as far as I remember). I wasn’t pleasant, even just using the computer was sluggish.
Last time I checked (a few years ago) Firefox has half the memory usage of Chrome, in practice.
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.
Maybe he’s going to run Links and Wordstar!
