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?
AntiX or Alpine
puppy linux. ironically its made to run completely in memory but only needs like 500meg
I put Antix on a 2Gb 64bit HP Atom. Worked well for notes and browsing. Oddly an SSD seemed to make little difference to performance compared to the previous HDD. Old architecture I guess.
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.
Probably Fedora.
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.
ZorinOS
Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.
I was always a fan of crunchbang when I used a couple of eee pcs as servers. It ran very light.
Is Crunchbang still maintained?
Crunchbang was amazing, but it’s sadly no more. Development stopped on it some time in 2015 I think.
Bunsenlabs is a direct successor to it, and should be good on OP’s system.
Not exactly, when Crunhbang development ceased Crunchbang++ aka #!++came out and that distro is currently maintained. As far as I can tell #!++ is more of the same, which is a good thing. I had to retire my tired old eee pcs a long while back, so the NUC I replaced it with was fine with standard Debian since it had 16x the ram.
Mx linux with fluxbox
alpine
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!
AntiX but sadly all it’s desktops only support x11.
How is that sad for an old machine?
Oh yeah older Nvidia drivers hate Wayland.
Last time i searched for “lightweight” linux distros (for an old Thnkpad) the ones i saw recommended the most were: TinyCore, Puppy, Porteus, Absolute, antiX, Q4OS, Slax, Sparky, MX.
I saw Bohdi and other Ubuntu-based distros suggested quite a lot as well but my definition of lightweight means under 1GiB usage.
For a DE go with XFCE or some other lightweight DE.Heavily customized LFS
