For a old laptop with Intel atom processor and I think 2gb ram.

  • hitagi (ani.social)
    30•10 months ago

    antiX I’ve used this before on an old laptop (also an atom and 2gb RAM) and it’s very lightweight. It just doesn’t have defaults that I prefer but if you tweak it enough, it should be fine.

  • @CAPSLOCKFTW@feddit.de
    29•10 months ago

    Might be overkill (or underkill), but Tiny Core Linux is the most lightweight I know. While having an up to date kernel (6.1.2) and glibc (2.3.6).

    What are the minimum requirements? An absolute minimum of RAM is 46mb. TC won’t boot with anything less, no matter how many terabytes of swap you have. Microcore runs with 28mb of ram. The minimum cpu is i486DX (486 with a math processor). A recommended configuration: Pentium 2 or better, 128mb of ram + some swap

  • StritEnglish
    24•10 months ago

    Also, I’ll just mention that it all means nothing as soon as you open a browser window. Then all your RAM is gonna be used up anyway.

      • StritEnglish
        10•10 months ago

        Sure, play your youtube videos on Lynx.

        We all know that’s one of the main things people use browsers for, that’s not work, these days. ;)

          • smplEnglish
            3•10 months ago

            I always play youtube videos with mpv.

            • @Holzkohlen@feddit.de
              1•10 months ago

              Do you just drag and drop into mpv or how does it work? With youtube seemingly trying to prevent the use of adblockers, I have to look for alternatives ahead of time.

              • smplEnglish
                1•10 months ago

                I must admit I copy paste the link to the terminal, so it’s not a seamless experience. I don’t watch enough videos to have done anything other than write a wrapper script with my preferred settings for youtube videos and to convert invidious links to youtube links.

                I just tried running mpv --idle=yes --force-window=yes from the terminal and drag a youtube link to the window. It plays like it should. yt-dlp is installed locally for my user in ~/.local/bin and that directory is appended to the PATH environment variable. I also have yt-dlp symlinked to youtube-dl for mpv to pick it up. I guess what’s missing is my preferred options for youtube videos, which I could set up in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf. Everytime some site breaks, you run yt-dlp -U to update and cross your fingers.

  • @banazir@lemmy.ml
    16•10 months ago

    You can do a really slim install of Debian that should work. For DE I recommend LXQT.

    If you’re feeling adventurous, Alpine might be slightly lighter. It’s a good distro.

    Those specs are not going to get you a terribly fast experience, but my laptop runs Debian ok and it’s in the same ballpark.

  • @throwawayish@lemmy.ml
    15•10 months ago

    As other have already alluded to, any distro with a lightweight desktop environment should work on that laptop. However, we don’t know if it would work out for you; simply for the fact that you haven’t given any other information.

    • L3ft_F13ld!
      6•10 months ago

      Isn’t LXDE basically discontinued? It got combined with RazorQT or something back in the day and became the LXQT we know today if I’m remembering right.

        • L3ft_F13ld!
          3•10 months ago

          Yeah it was a good middle of the road option. There’s much lighter, but it gets a lot more involved at that point.

  • Garbage DataEnglish
    10•10 months ago

    I’ve heard Puppy Linux is good, never tried it myself however.

  • vxnxnt
    8•10 months ago

    If you want to take it to the extreme, Alpine is probably one of the best options.

  • Gazumi
    7•10 months ago

    With the Atom processor, I had “best” result with Puppy linux whether from USB or actually installed to hard drive. I could run Lubuntu, MX, etc., Tiny core, for me, was a little too little and certainly not “fit and forget”. When I bought a new (to me) laptop with more RAM and later chipset, I still stayed with Puppy. There’s very little that can’t be done with it.

  • gian
    7•10 months ago

    You can use whatever distro you want that you can install on it (btw it is a eeepc?), just avoid to install heavy programs and/or DE.

    IIRC there should be a Debian derive distro for atoms, I used it on a eeepc, don’t know of still a thing

  • @space@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    7•10 months ago

    It’s not worth it. Ram is dirt cheap, you can get 8gb for like $30. For $150-$200, you can find an used Thinkpad that will perform 1000x better.

    I would only use such a machine for playing with old software like Windows 2000 or XP, old Linux distros.

  • @Mo5560@feddit.de
    6•10 months ago

    In my personal experience void linux ran the smoothest on all my old laptops (compared to stuff like arch and antiX, I defo didn’t try everything).