Heavily customized LFS
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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Unfortunately, modern web browsers are horrible pigs. No matter what distro you put on this thing, interacting with webpages will be s-l-o-w. (I have a similar laptop—2 GB RAM, Athlon64x2 CPU—running Gentoo, and while it's functional in its primary job of "larger-screen video iPod for 720p or less", starting a browser takes a while.) The niche your friend wants to make this machine fill is about the worst one possible for it.
My friend always recommended puppy linux fur such devices, he was very happy with it
I personally think alpine might be a good fit, it is very lightweight. It does not use systemd though and is therefore in many ways different than most distros(for some this is a good thing). I know it from postmarketOS (optimised for phone hardware)
Other than that, you may just take Arch, as it comes pretty minimal and you can choose for every package to use the most lightweight solution
Or you can go even more personalised with gentoo, linuxFroScratch or yocto. Just requires some skill, but skill can always be acquired by learning and doing.
Why wouldn't Debian run?
Debian is the OS, with its package manager and some applications suggested by default. You can install Debian with X, without X, with a certain window manager or another, etc. So... Debian WILL 100% run, the question rather is WHICH software should you pick that gives the best compromise between ease of use (specific to that person) AND performance (specific to that computer).
PS: to be clear, that's the same for other distributions. There are distributions that specifically target older hardware and that in turn might facilitate the process but usually if you do check how such distributions are done, they are basically Debian (or NixOS or Alpine or whatever) with a specific package selection. It's rare (if ever? counter-example) to have anything special that would somehow "boost" performance for hardware, especially here when it's rather common hardware.
FWIW I did run on old hardware with ratpoison and had a blazing fast experience, much more responsive than "top" hardware back then. So... yes IMHO it's about the wm/de usually, the rest follows. Obviously you can't run super demanding software, e.g. video editing, 3D modeling, etc but that's usually rather obvious.
This is good RAM for any 32 bit OS which is still being maintained.
64 bit OS require minimum 4 GB.
I don't think Google will like any 32 bit device though. Go for an older version from libreoffice.
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.
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.
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!
This!
Even 4GB RAM is low for web browsers and they're gonna struggle, A LOT, even with just one tab open, is going to be painfully slow to not want to use it anymore.
Old laptops like this, don't have hardware video decoders for YouTube or any video in AVC or HEVC códecs that is used everywhere today.
You can use Gnumeric for spreadsheets and Abiword for docs if Libreoffice is too slow.
Last time I checked (a few years ago) Firefox has half the memory usage of Chrome, in practice.
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.
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?
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.
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.
As another said on the thread — it’s not really Linux that is the issue here as much as the internet. Browsers are just memory hogs now and you’re not going to get an enjoyable experience on 2gb of ram imo, if the goal is to have a functional laptop. OTOH, it would be a great little project server to play around with things like pihole or your Arrs🏴☠️ or other self hosting goodness.
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.
Probably Fedora.
The most important thing is not the distribution, but to enable ZRAM (or ZSWAP) and use a lightweight desktop. I am not sure how much difference a 32bit vs a 64bit distribution makes, but if possible you could take one for the team and run some trials and report your numbers (RAM usage) back here.
Of course I recommend Debian with a lightweight desktop of your choice, or Alpine.
I'm not sure that cpu will be able to handle memory compression with a usable speed. I would expect it to make it even slower
I don't know either, but unless one uses zstd (lzo seems more like a thing for this hardware), I would hope that it is totally usable. (Running zstd memory compression on a Raspberry Pi 2, w/o any noticeable speed impact)
A 32 bit distro will make a BIG difference with that much RAM.
Show me some numbers! ;-) ... Perhaps I miss something, but basically we have 32bit pointers vs. 64bit pointers, the rest of the data should be the same size. 64bit should be faster for tasks where the CPU is the bottleneck/computations, so IMHO it will be an interesting tradeoff with no clear winner for me.
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.
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.
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puppy linux. ironically its made to run completely in memory but only needs like 500meg
Mx linux with fluxbox
Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It's also available with a Debian base.
Puppy would fly on there, or even DSL 2024. Heck, both those distros would fly even on a Pentium 4 of all things.
But web browsers and video players are going to be painful with any distro.
The Goanna browsers will run on pretty low-spec hardware, and there's also h.264ify for sites like YT, unless Google blocked YT from loading on Goanna browsers.
You would be amazed how much 32 bit helps. If you do not open too many tabs, the web should be fine. Video no problem ( at reasonable resolutions).
I think antiX would be a nice option. I installed it on a 20 years old laptop and it runs quite fast.
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.
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!
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.
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