@nostupidquestions is it true that linux cannot run on a laptop without any SSD ?
I had gone inquiring at a couple of local stores regarding restoring my 2gb Ram laptop with 500gb HDD. At both of the places l was told that l need to put in at least 4gb of fresh ram + insert a bare minimum SSD, otherwise windows wouldn’t run on it.
When l said that l’d be working on linux, this technician guy told me that even linux has become heavy these days. Not sure what he meant by this, but extra ram burns a lot of holes, not mention about the price of SSD.
So, l just want to make sure. Is it true that modern machines won’t work without any SSD or machines with 2gb rams are simply fit for the museum ?
You can run some distros from a 2gb USB stick. Not sure what these guys are talking about th.
No, it is not true
You don’t even need a HDD or SSD. You can just run from the boot media.
@Dultas this is something completely new.
No, this is wrong, Linux can run on an HDD.
Linux runs on a potato, you may need to be picky about the distro the more resource constrained you are, but that’s it.
Or may want a bigger potato for convenience.
The low ram is a problem but why not just try it? Its free
The 2GB of RAM are going to hit you harder than the HDD, if you intend to run a modern browser on it…
This, the computer will work great for basic tasks but anything JavaScript heavy will slow things down.
It can even run diskless just over the network. Like Ubuntu diskless booting.
Linux can run off an HDD.
Hell, there are versions of Linux that are designed to be run off a USB stick.
Hell, there’s even Linux distributions that run off a floppy disk.
https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/boot_floppies.html
https://krzysztofjankowski.com/floppinux/floppinux-2025.html
Running live from usb at the moment.
Linux can run on a fucking potato.
It can also run on a celibate potato - it’s very flexible
@kmartburrito @NegativeLookAhead what’s a celibate potato ?
A wordplay.
If there is a “fucking potato” there should also be a “celibate potato”
It has no qualms with the life choices of the potato.
the thing about linux is it depends what you put on it. there are lightweight distros. that being said if you can put an ssd in something do it as nothing outside of more ram when you are maxing it improves it as much as an ssd. I mean im sure if you go back far enough in cpu the drive may no longer be the bottleneck.
He’s a big box store professional; in other words constantly confidently incorrect.
Also trying to sell you something … potentially on commission.
If you want to run a modern current linux distro on a laptop with only 2gb of ram and 500gb then your options are very limited, but it is possible.
For example. Void Linux with Enlightenment will work. A browser will work ok for basic websites but heavy apps like Gmail will be unusably slow.
If you have no option to upgrade, you can still use a machine with those specs to run linux apps like Abiword, Gnumeric, GIMP, etc very well.
Also, putting in any SSD drive to replace the spinning one is the single best upgrade you can make in terms of performance and longevity on an old laptop.
With such constrained resources zram and zswap can help. But do not expect miracles.
No, but an SSD really does make the computer a lot faster, no matter the OS.
You don’t even need an ssd or hdd. The ram will hurt more.
There are versions of Linux that don’t need any internal storage at all, eg. Puppy.
Puppylinux is the first thing that comes to mind.
Then pxe boot + nfs root
