I recently got a 10 dollar working netbook from a thiftstore. It has 2 ram and is from 2010 but isint the up-gradable version. Im wondering what os to run on it do i go with something like a android build or a linux setup? Im could also use some neat use cases. Ive thought about doing retro game on it but there are possible better solutions?
xubuntu, or debian xfce.
puppy linux or damn small linux are strong contenders but you don’t need to go so far with 2gb of ram.
2TiB ram is good enough if you are running ZFS but just make sure it has ECC.
The specific os doesn’t really matter, just get one that runs a lightweight WM. Whatever you pick, make sure you enable Zswap on it to really squeeze every bit of performance out of that ram.
I have a similar device, made around 2013, Atom CPU, 2 gigs of RAM, 32 gig emmc drive, no exandability.
I run Arch with QTile on it without much of a problem, though as others have mentioned, web browsing would be a pain with more than a few tabs open. Youtube is a no-go too.
I currently use it mostly to test an image editing GUI im working on. I know that if it is snappy on such poor hardware it would work perfectly fine anywhere else.
I suggest Q4OS (with Trinity DE). It loads itself at 340 MB of RAM, so it leaves you with a lot of free RAM (especially since the heaviest apps now are browsers – youtube needs 1 GB for itself). Arch Linux with XFCE can be made to boot at 470 MB. Debian starts at 650 MB. Ubuntu/Fedora start at over 1.5 GB so avoid.
Then of course there are the damnsmalllinux, antix etc, but the user experience on these is bad. Q4OS feels like a modern OS with GUI panels for everything, while not taking lots of ram.
You totally beat me to it. This was going to be my recommendation.
You may even choose the 32 version which will be dramatically more memory efficient. Not everything is available but probably everything you need.
It is possible that hardware from 2010 requires a 32 bit OS anyway. 64 bit only appeared a couple of years before and low end systems could still be 32 bit.
Yes, 2 gigs seem laughable compared to more recent devices but I’m still running an Acer C720 Chromebook with 2 GB RAM as my couch PC/digital typewriter. EndeavourOS plus Plasma and Librewolf (with UBlock Origin and a tab deactivation addon) provide an okay browsing experience and editing documents is rather smooth. Saving said documents may sometimes require it an extra moment to think, especially on larger files.
Even some basic image editing with GIMP and some light 2010ish video games through wine are no problem.The CPU feels like the bigger bottleneck on my system (maybe to blame on ZRAM).
Is it 32-bit? If it is, then that also severely limits your options. Personally, I just throw Debian or one of its derivatives on old hardware like that. You may want to consider Q4OS. It’s Debian based and is geared specifically towards old and low-end hardware. Interestingly, it’s also one of only a couple distros that ship with Trinity as a desktop environment.
Retro gaming is definitely doable with 2GB of RAM, considering that older Raspberry Pi boards can do it with just 1GB. In that case you could try Batocera.
Some other ideas include running something like Nextcloud or a media server on it on your home network. In that case, I’d again recommend Debian.
I have one of those at home… I set up a samba server to store my music library and mounted it on my raspberry pi to run a navidrome server
any distro with lightweight wm would work. I’d try slackware with windowmaker or fvwm.
Alternatively you can try tinycore, it’s supposed to be blazing fast because the whold system runs on ram.
For web browsing try seamonkey with ematrix for blocking stuff.
During 2022~2024 I used a 2008 Macbook with 5400rpm HDD, 2.5GB ram and its CPU throttled to 800mhz on Slackware15 as my primary machine and it was perfectly usable.
Like others have said, Debian probably isn’t a bad idea.
I feel like it would be kind of stupid to run a full-on desktop environment even though technically possible, though - I think this is a good use for IceWM.
Also, at worst, you might have a really low power server.
My arch linux with KDE only uses 500Mb ram after boot and I have a handfull of apps in the autostart. So I would guess with some explicitly lighter desktop environment you can be well below 100Mb
If you have a chance to add an ssd or nvme you could allocate a decently sized swap partition and let the OS handle the rest.
Maybe you won’t be able to watch full HD youtube in big fat chrome browser, but otherwise it should work just fine I think.
Any Linux distribution will work, your biggest problem is your web browser. (They are fat fucking pigs) outside of that problem less than 64MB is still usable
I think less than 64MB is difficult these days - a few years ago, I was backing up a laptop with 48MB of RAM, and to get a minimal Linux terminal running on it, I had to create a custom Buildroot image and throw it on a CD. TinyCore was too much for it.
A fast SSD with 2GB of swap really helps.
No, I mean TinyCore literally would run out of RAM during boot.
I’m still trying to find a decently low-spec machine to run WfW 3.11 on, so, as you mentioned retro gaming, that might be an alternative.
I used to run Gentoo (and build it too) on an arm tablet with 1gb RAM, quite a few years ago. It was an Asus TF700T with an hardware keyboard and touch screen.
It’s painful and really almost useless. You can setup the tyniest of the window manger and tools, but forget about browsing, using any office program, and probably a lot more.
With patience, it can be used i guess. Also, could be a nice command line only device with decent results.
Hm, 2GB RAM is a tough limitation. Even ChromeOS Flex has a minimum requirement of 4GB. I’m not saying it’s impossible to find something that’ll run with just 2GB, but you’re probably not going to have any fun with it.
Plus, is the CPU even 64bit yet? Many distros have dropped their 32bit support already.You can have a lot of fun with it. I assure you. And you can still command the cloud and much of the web (including LLMs) from such a machine.
With a text-mode editor, you can do a fair bit of programming. You could teach yourself Docker.
There are lots of entertaining games that would run on that machine.
If this was the only machine you had access to, you would be amazed at what it could do. We are spoiled.
That said, I agree that one overly heavy JavaScript web page could bring it to a crawl. Both things are true.
There are still a lot of 32 bit distros based off Debian (like Q4OS mentioned above). Debian no longer supports Pentium though. If you need that, go for Adelie Linux.
It’s not hard to make Linux run on 2GB of RAM. The hard part is getting a web browser to run on 2GB without constantly swapping.
Define Linux. The most basic kernel for a given hardware set, a console emulator and a lightweight alternative libc busybox package? Yes.
An up-to-date desktop suite? Hardly so.Define Linux.
any distro with a lightweight desktop suite: xfce, lxqt, openbox, twms like sway…
as the guy said, internet browsing is more of a challenge, but can work on lightweight browsers, or if you limit ourself to just a couple of tabs.
I recently installed ChromeOS flex on a 2GB RAM device and it seems to work fine, it was an old EoL Chromebook though
