I have an HP Stream 11 that I want to use for word processing and some light web browsing - I’m a writer and it’s a lightweight laptop to bring to the library or coffee shop to write on. Right now it’s got Windows and it’s unusable due to lack of hard drive space for updates. Someone had luck with Xubuntu, but it’s been a few years and it seems like Xubuntu is no longer trying to be a lightweight distro for use cases like this.
My experience with Linux is very limited - I played around with Peppermint Linux a bit back when it was a Lubuntu fork and I used Ubuntu on the lab computers in college. I can follow instructions to make a live boot and I can do an apt-get (so something Debian-based might be best for compatibility and familiarity) but I mostly have no idea what I’m doing, lol. I used to do DOS gaming as a kid so having to do the occasional thing via command line isn’t going to scare me off but I’m not going to pretend to have knowledge I don’t. I’m probably going to go with Mint on my gaming laptop next year but I suspect it’s not the best choice for my blue bezeled potato (although I might try it anyway).
Someone should come up with a new distro with the name potatOS, just for cases like this .
There’s already a bunch of distros for lower-end hardware. PuppyLinux is probably what you’re looking for, and it’s actually a genre of distro that takes a typical distro like SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch etc. and packages it into a slimmer spin with some shared utilities.
I’m surprised noone have mentioned Lubuntu yet. It’s a debloated and light weight version of Ubuntu and can run on very old hardware. I’ve used it in the past before on shitty hardware with great success
Debian and xfce, easy
I have debian 32bit running on my extremely underpowered 2009 eeepc - 1.6ghz atom, 1gig ram. Cinnamon as DE
It’s up to date as well.
Websites are pretty useless but it works well as a music server and can digitise my vinyl with several plugins without dropping any packets.
With 2gig you’ll be able to browse the web
Linux Mint Debian Edition XFCE like someone else said already.
On a second note, maybe you’ll find the program Scribus of interest to you.
Debian + xfce.
I second Debian with LXDE. I run it on much older hardware with no issue.
I don’t play games but isn’t https://bazzite.gg/ the latest and best shit for gaming? If so, it would be good to try a live image of another atomic fedora image https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops . I’d recommend a tiling window manager because it uses less RAM. You can also easily start with KDE and rebase to a tiling window manager if it doesn’t work out as planned.
I use arch (btw) and always lie around tty. Id recommend the same for you, coz most my work, i.e programming (writing), anime and youtube can be done in tty itself. Id recommend highly any terminal based text editor. I enter GUI environment almost only for web browsing (if you guys know something for web browsing from tty, pls mention it) im gonna assume you need it more as a writer, and you are familiar with debian and not that familiar with dirty works on cli, so i cant recommend u to go with window managers like hyprland or something but if u want ram usage under 250M thats what u shuld use (i can help with setup and everything, if you want). So you may use debian with kde, ig.
Someone else mentioned the browser issue so I went looking for what was available (and I’ll probably try Firefox first), but I found Lynx, maybe that’s what you’re looking for?
Thanks. So u chose anything?
Not yet, I’ll try live booting some of the suggestions like Lubuntu, AntiX, and Debian (probably LXDE) and see which one works the best. Debian is about as much of a challenge as I’m willing to take on for this project, but I figure I’ll learn something at least, and if I do get it running it’s probably going to be solid. If all else fails I’ll look at a Puppy.
