Debian with the choice of LXDE as window manager. Debian offers high configurability to remove any heavy component.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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That's a good point, I could jus try debian and remove the unnecessary stuff. I want my daughter to use this laptop so it needs some video codecs and hopefully some educational games.
Some commenters said you need a minimum of 2GB memory to run Debian. What do you make of that?
Don't want to hurt your daughter. And don't want to hurt the Linux community by making a girl hate Linux when she's a child.
Hannah Montana Linux?
LOL
Why would she hate Linux?
Because it's SLOOOOOOOOOW.
This laptop wouldn't even run on windows so I'm not sure what you're suggesting
See this: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch03s04.en.html Minimum 1Gb, preferably 2 for a desktop.
Ah, good to know. I wonder how is it possible then for Debain-based distros (MX) to run well on this notebook
The Distro is not important, just debloat it. Something like Alpine is actually smaller, but in the end the Desktop needs to be tiny.
Good point. Thanks
If you can run the Raspberry Pi Desktop that would be good. Wayland and I think very light.
I am thinking about installing that on Fedora, rebranding and all, to have an actually small Wayland Desktop, because the current options are either WMs or bigger Desktops
Puppy Linux is very active on the 32bit land.
yeah MX21 32bits is what I would install, or AntiX.
Can't you boot on a USB key and reset the root password on your HD partition?
AntiX! Of course. I thought Antix had merged with Mepis to create MX. Didn't know they were still around. probably the best choice since it still seems to be based on Debian Stable
AntiX is awesome on old HW, everything works, just don't load a big website in the browser or it crawls :)
See if you can get the memory upgraded. DDR3 SO-DIMMs should be dirt cheap.
I'd also get a cheap SSD aswell, especially if this is for a child who might not be very careful with the machine.
Hmmm yeah I hadn't thought about upgrading the laptop, that's a big idea, and indeed it should be super cheap
I use super old hardware as well. An SSD will blow your mind.
I would recommend FreeDOS
Thanks but the laptop is for my 3-yeard old daughter. I hope she becomes a linux user but she's not there yet (to use FreeDOS) :)
I put galliumOS on the laptop for my toddler... he likes it! But thats a specific distro for a specific netbook. Whatever you get, try GCompris, it's a good collection of educational software
Thanks! I'll check it out
One distro that I've recently found runs pretty well on older/slower systems like this is wattOS. It's a distro focused on power efficiency, but because of that it does well on underpowered systems.
I have no experience for this matter, nor a lot of Linux either, but there seem to be some interesting choices here (there isn't best and worst, it's just a list, and the most adapted to what you need).
https://itsfoss.com/32-bit-linux-distributions/
Obviously the minimum system requirements should not be your max amount of ram. You need to account for apps or tools you'll run.
Thanks, that list was very helpful in confirming some of the ideas I already had.
If you don't have to use it but want to keep it functional, why just not reinstall MX again? You know that and how it works
Because it does give me a functional piece of software to grab YouTube videos without actually opening YouTube, but it cannot really run Firefox with uBlock, which basically means web browsing is impossible
Lubuntu
AntiX or Arch 32 bit
Yeah I'm going with AntiX. Used it a long time ago and assumed it had merged with Mepis to do MX, but thanks to this thread I find out it's still available
Arch Linux 32.
I'd probably try a minimal Debian installation with the Openbox WM.
Link, in case you're having trouble locating the .iso: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-12.2.0-i386-netinst.iso