You know those Acer mini laptops from around 2010 back when tablets weren't really a thing?
Linux Mint runs on those bad boys.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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It's not worth it. Ram is dirt cheap, you can get 8gb for like $30. For $150-$200, you can find an used Thinkpad that will perform 1000x better.
I would only use such a machine for playing with old software like Windows 2000 or XP, old Linux distros.
I've heard Debian and Alpine are good lightweight distros
I think most distros will run fine on most hardware though (please correct me if I'm wrong) it's the software you run on it (as in, going with a GNOME desktop environment is going to be much more demanding than xfce for example)
Just toss it.
Surprised Void Linux has not been recommended. I suggest giving it a try.
In my personal experience void linux ran the smoothest on all my old laptops (compared to stuff like arch and antiX, I defo didn't try everything).
Also, I'll just mention that it all means nothing as soon as you open a browser window. Then all your RAM is gonna be used up anyway.
Can I introduce you to Lynx?
Sure, play your youtube videos on Lynx.
We all know that's one of the main things people use browsers for, that's not work, these days. ;)
Any modern browser will probably kill your setup anyway.
As other have already alluded to, any distro with a lightweight desktop environment should work on that laptop. However, we don't know if it would work out for you; simply for the fact that you haven't given any other information.
If you want to take it to the extreme, Alpine is probably one of the best options.
What would you use this laptop for?
I've dealt with similar hardware, using Qtile over a Manjaro base, but had to mostly use CLI/TUI apps. Anything related to web browsing is a pain.
Not sure. But I have other primary laptop. And this laptop is just sitting so I wanted try something with it.
If you just want to play around with it, I highly recommend some arch based distro (because you can find plenty of obscure TUI apps in the AUR) with a window manager (be it tiling like Qtile or stacking like Openbox).
If you want something preconfigured, I've recently found instantOS, which seems to work fine for that usecase.
I use this small laptop mostly for ebooks (using the excellent epy) and music, using one ot the TUI YouTube frontends.
Might be overkill (or underkill), but Tiny Core Linux is the most lightweight I know. While having an up to date kernel (6.1.2) and glibc (2.3.6).
What are the minimum requirements? An absolute minimum of RAM is 46mb. TC won't boot with anything less, no matter how many terabytes of swap you have. Microcore runs with 28mb of ram. The minimum cpu is i486DX (486 with a math processor). A recommended configuration: Pentium 2 or better, 128mb of ram + some swap
I want to daily driver this for fun for a while. Only problem, just installed Arch, so I need to wait a bit