Which distro would you install on a celeron 2gb ram laptop for a lay person to use?
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Puppy Linux is what I usually see recommended for such low specs. It's also available with a Debian base.
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Debian can be pretty light/small on a clean install and xfce should run fine on 2gb. Although the biggest thing is gonna be if the laptop has fast storage or not. Since its a celeron it might not be upgradeable, and if it doesnt already have an SSD any desktop will feel slow
Personally if I really wanted to squeeze all the performance I could for web browsing I'd go with minimal Debian and RiverWM but thats a bit more involved
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I think antiX would be a nice option. I installed it on a 20 years old laptop and it runs quite fast.
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If your friend is not tech savvy person, i would go with Mint XFCE (maybe Zorin OS Lite). Surely, it will be not as lightweight as Debian, but it will be much more user friendly for him
If he actually feel comfortable tinkering with OS - along side Debian maybe Bodhi Linux or antiX? I tried both of them on one of (in)famous Intel-based netbooks with 512mb RAM and they worked quite well.
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honestly the distro doesn't matter so much as long as the hardware i supported. run a minimal desktop, disable CPU hogs and file indexing etc.
I used fvwm on Debian for many years on old computers. worked great. now I have kde/plasma on arch. my 10 year old laptop handles it fine...
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I think Slitaz is still around, I always liked that for older machines, I was going to try it on an AMD C-50 laptop I pulled out of storage recently, except I don’t have time for messing around.
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disable CPU hogs and file indexing etc.
Do you have some tips for that?
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With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It's a really light distro.
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I did not know, that background images could have this enormous effect! Good to know!!
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Fedora.
It seems to be easy to manage and fast to install.
SUSE is slow to run and self-update.
Debian is far behind and Ubuntu seems to always have an issue during or right after installation.
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VoidLinux
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Mint.
It's extremely stable Linux for your grandma, that comes with every tool that she will ever use and on the cinnamon interface all those tools are exactly where she will expect them to be if she is used to using Windows.
I've gotten three boomers to use it and they hardly ever ask for tech support because it's so stable.
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Raspberry Pi OS
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minios
https://minios.dev/ -
AntiX or Alpine
