It’s an old model (Acer One D257) Processor is Intel Atom. Memory is 1GB DDR3 with 320 GB of HDD. I currently Have MX 21 running on it, but I need to reinstall because I forgot the root password. Since I’m reinstalling the OS, I thought I’d ask here for recommendations for an OS that makes the most of this oldie.
Debian
Yeah it’s going to be a debian-based at least, that’s for sure
Debian based distros can be very different from each other. Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, etc are all based off debian. I think what the commenter you’re replying to is saying is to install the stock debian image, because that’s the lightest version of debian.
I used to like Debian based (and still do; I use it on my server with no intention of switching) but Opensuse is great on the desktop and supports 32 bit. Even tumbleweed is rock solid.
I’ve been hearing good things about opensuse while researching my alternatives
Isnt min suggested 2GB for debian? Well I was running it on 1GB
I installed it successfully on a 512 MB machine the other day, with LXQT. Didn’t run very well though.
The Distro is not important, just debloat it. Something like Alpine is actually smaller, but in the end the Desktop needs to be tiny.
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Good point. Thanks
If you can run the Raspberry Pi Desktop that would be good. Wayland and I think very light.
I am thinking about installing that on Fedora, rebranding and all, to have an actually small Wayland Desktop, because the current options are either WMs or bigger Desktops
Personally I am using a netbook like this as a headless server with Ubuntu.
You can try to run Lubuntu, or even TinyCore and Puppy Linux on this for simple tasks.
Generally speaking, with 1GB of ram and Intel atom, as you stay away from video streaming platforms and use simple tools for writing text or run simple code in python, you would be fine. However with less than 100€ you can find laptops with core i5 4rd generation with 8gb ram. I am not sure if it worths it.
I had similar netbook like OP and was running Lubuntu for a very long time but afaik they dropped support for 32 bit architectures some time ago. I think 18.04 was the last 32 bit LTS? Not sure, I’d need to check it
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Oh shit, what newest release did you upgrade to? I think I have MX21 in my Acer one
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Thanks, that’s actually a very clear tutorial. Definitely saving it
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Puppy Linux is very active on the 32bit land.
I’d recommend Alpine and running it headless. Realistically you’d need 4GB+ of ram to run a modern desktop session so that’s not ideal. However running Alpine headless will leave you with 800M to run programs.
You can still run a GUI desktop on it but I’d recommend having a nice sized swap partition/file to make up for it. It’ll be slow as soon as you hit the 1GB memory and starting swapping out.
It’s not the desktop that needs 4 GB, it’s large apps like modern browser or office. The desktop will run fine on 1 GB. May want to look into Midori and Abiword as alternatives.
Absolutely correct, Alpine can run a desktop environment with 500 megs.
You might be able to reset the root password by booting to single user, or using a rescue usb.
That said, you could take the chance to try one of the BSDs.
See if you can get the memory upgraded. DDR3 SO-DIMMs should be dirt cheap.
I’d also get a cheap SSD aswell, especially if this is for a child who might not be very careful with the machine.
Hmmm yeah I hadn’t thought about upgrading the laptop, that’s a big idea, and indeed it should be super cheap
I use super old hardware as well. An SSD will blow your mind.
Whatever distro you install, make sure you enable zram, it makes old computers with low ram much more usable, and an out of memory killer too.
Ooms are much less necessary with MGLRU if they keep to a new kernel
I’d still use an oom killer even on 6.1 which is the kernel Debian uses, mglru got improvements in following kernels like you said.
The Linux kernel already has OOM killing… Do you mean something like Facebook’s
oomdwhere you can more easily control it from userspace?yeah, from what i remember the kernel’s oom killer isn’t that fast and external ones work better
Thanks! Great advice 👍
Alpine Linux could be worth giving a shot very lightweight!
Interesting. I search for Alpine Linux and the first search result was a Lemmy community. Looks interesting. Thanks!
I have no experience for this matter, nor a lot of Linux either, but there seem to be some interesting choices here (there isn’t best and worst, it’s just a list, and the most adapted to what you need).
https://itsfoss.com/32-bit-linux-distributions/
Obviously the minimum system requirements should not be your max amount of ram. You need to account for apps or tools you’ll run.
Thanks, that list was very helpful in confirming some of the ideas I already had.
Something like Sugar or Doudoulinux would perhaps be more suitable for your daughter.
Doudoulinux has not been updated since ages , but it will run very well on any old laptop.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check those out
I’d probably try a minimal Debian installation with the Openbox WM.
Link, in case you’re having trouble locating the .iso: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-12.2.0-i386-netinst.iso
One distro that I’ve recently found runs pretty well on older/slower systems like this is wattOS. It’s a distro focused on power efficiency, but because of that it does well on underpowered systems.
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I’ve been using MX since it was Mepis. I love seeing it said well recommended in this thread. For the old laptop I’ll go with AntiX
