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?
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.
Run a 32 bit distro. It is the only thing that will run well on 2 GB of RAM. It will run better than you think.
Q4OS, Antix, MX Linux, Damn Small Linux, and even pure 32 bit Debian are decent candidates. If you use Q4, give the Trinity desktop a shot.
I like Andelie Linux as well but MUSL may cause problems for an unsophisticated user.
I think antiX would be a nice option. I installed it on a 20 years old laptop and it runs quite fast.
Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It’s also available with a Debian base.
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.
Last time I checked (a few years ago) Firefox has half the memory usage of Chrome, in practice.
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.
Maybe he’s going to run Links and Wordstar!
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.
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
Lubuntu has always been solid for me for low spec machines.
With only 2 gb of RAM it will be slow, there is almost no avoiding that part.
it will be slow
Then it’s a bad recommendation.
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.
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.)
AntiX or Alpine
Raspberry Pi OS or antiX.
minios https://minios.dev/
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.
alpine
