Linux, on the other hand, can easily boot up on a 10-year-old laptop with just 2GB of RAM, and work fine.
I’m not sure a modern day browser would be just fine with “only” 2GiB, unfortunately.
Maybe with zRAM and a bit of swap it could run quite ok 🤷
As long as the drive the swap is on is an SSD, yeah absolutely
Im using a 4gb laptop with Xfce, and its definitely struggling sometimes. Even though it’s usable, I doubt 2gb would be enough
I used to have only 4GB in my old Linux HTPC, didn’t take much for it to choke when using the browser. Upgraded to 16GB and no issues since
I have 3GB of RAM on my PC running Linux Mint, using LibreWolf, it works pretty great for me, I mean I can’t open 100 tabs, but 10-15 is possible
That’s what palemoon is for. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but if you don’t have the RAM to run
crysislibrewolf on high it’ll work.I’ve tried to use Fedora Workstation in VM (GNOME Boxes) with only 1GiB RAM. And it is even usable and UI is responsible for GNOME and Firefox, but applications start more slowly. All those at cost of higher CPU usage. Probably it performs well because Fedora uses swap on ZRam, and it makes the system more reliable.
There’s Linux dists that can only requires less than 200 MB of RAM. Absolute Linux for an example, has a minimum system requirement of 64 MB RAM. Plenty of space left for memory hungry softwares like a browser.
Lynx 4 Life!