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?
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 would fly on there, or even DSL 2024. Heck, both those distros would fly even on a Pentium 4 of all things.
ZorinOS
Puppy or Debian with openbox or another light wm , is crunchbang still a thing ?.
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.
Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.
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.
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 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
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.
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.)
Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It’s also available with a Debian base.
AntiX or Alpine
minios https://minios.dev/
I think antiX would be a nice option. I installed it on a 20 years old laptop and it runs quite fast.
