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What distro should I use to revive this cutie over here? (europe.pub)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.world
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Hi!

Someone asked me to revive their 20 year old laptop as its no longer working on their installation of windows XP.

This baby has around 512MB of Ram, 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom.

This is my first time doing something with hardware older than myself so I'd love some insight from people around.

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[–] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

TinyCore (loads itself into RAM), Puppy, Proteus and Zolin Lite will all be happy with 512 MiB.

Edit: also antiX, QOS, Slax and DSL.

Archbang, Slitaz, Sparky and MX may not support x86, double-check.

Also gentoo has a full binary-only version now.

Edit2:
Interesting that Zorin says their regular flavors are now efficient enough that they'll run just fine on older hardware, so there's no need to continue Zorin Lite:

It’s now possible to run the non-Lite editions of Zorin OS on computers with as little as 2 GB of RAM and on machines as old as 15 years, with higher performance than the Lite edition in some tasks.

Emphasis mine. Wow, only 2 GiB...

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Emphasis mine. Wow, only 2 GiB...

    That's not as low as you'd think, to be fair. I've tried to run Kubuntu on a 10 year old laptop with 2 GiB RAM and it worked, if only a little laggy. That being said, it crashes after half an hour without swap. But with swap, it is legitimately daily drivable (as long as you don't run heavy apps, of course).

    I'd imagine a distro that's designed to be even more lightweight would be able to handle that.

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