I have a very, very old laptop with me. I don’t know the exact specs, but it has a single core celeron processor and 4GB of RAM. It’s an old little thing, maybe 15 years old.

I installed Debian on it with LXQT and it was chugging hard. I don’t expect it will run modern browsers anyways, so give me your best distros that can run on a potato and have a GUI.

  • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
    61·
    6 months ago

    That’s not a potato, that’s a fossil.

    Arch with LXQT, maybe? Then you can choose to install specifically what you want with minimal overhead. Another option is the minimal version of NixOS, but like Arch, you’d need to install a DE separately, and you’d need to learn how to use Nix.

    But if it’s still struggling, might be best as an art piece or command line only, given that a Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 can be had for <$100 and neither struggles with lighter DEs or browsers.

  • veng@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    I had a net top thing from asus that had worse specs than that running fine a few years ago on AntiX. It was just used as a thin client mostly but did the job.

  • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
    31·
    6 months ago

    Is gaming the main use case? If so, I think the distro won’t be the biggest performance factor.

    If gaming is not the case, I would ask myself this question: Is a desktop environment a must? Because you’d be surprised by how much you’re still able to do without one.

    • simple@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      This thing definitely won’t be gaming, but I’d like to maybe play videos (probably at a low resolution) and mp3 files at least.

      • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        In that case I’d go for something very barebone. Get a minimalistic debian up and running, and see how that works. There are plenty of lightweight desktop environments (to the extent some of them count as desktop environments), where TWM is an extreme example.