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?
Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It’s also available with a Debian base.
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.
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.
32 bit version of firefox, because it makes a huge difference in low ram devices.
How so? What CPU does she have?
How so?
32 bit pointers take up half as much RAM as 64 bit pointers. A complicated application like a web browser consumes much more memory as a 64 bit app than it does as a 32 bit app. That is true of most programs but you are really going to notice it in both desktop environment and your web browser.
I assumed a x64. Debian (the distro mx linux is based on) offers multiarch support, so i just had to enable it by running:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 sudo apt updateThen, to install 32-bit firefox, I first uninstalled it and then installed the 32-bit version:
sudo apt remove firefox-esr sudo apt install firefox-esr:i386With the standard 64 bit version, the browser would struggle with just 2 or 3 tabs, and with the 32 bit version, she can use like 10 tabs without problems
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
puppy linux. ironically its made to run completely in memory but only needs like 500meg
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?
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.
I think antiX would be a nice option. I installed it on a 20 years old laptop and it runs quite fast.
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.
I recently had to use a friend’s old 4gb macbook for some weeks because my laptop was stolen. I was surprised how well everything worked, even when using a few web apps in firefox. I think with using zram and avoiding web / electron apps where possible, you might get quite something out of a 4gb machine.
I’m on a 4gb machine right now and it’s tolerable if I don’t do too many things at once, but Google Docs bogs in particular bogs it down.
AntiX but sadly all it’s desktops only support x11.
How is that sad for an old machine?
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!!
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.
alpine
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.
VoidLinux
It is probably the best solution to the low memory problem, but it is also the least common and may be the most difficult.
There is a xfce live edition and a good wiki. Not having systemd is a great thing for these old specs in my experience.
Is dbus still available on non-systemd?
Yes, you have to enable the service, this is for voidlinux (runit): https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/session-management.html
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.
