Which distro would you install on a celeron 2gb ram laptop for a lay person to use?

[notagoblin@lemmy.world]

I put Antix on a 2Gb 64bit HP Atom. Worked well for notes and browsing. Oddly an SSD seemed to make little difference to performance compared to the previous HDD.
Old architecture I guess.

[captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works]

Is Crunchbang still maintained?

[dfx4509b_2@lemmy.org]

The Goanna browsers will run on pretty low-spec hardware, and there's also h.264ify for sites like YT, unless Google blocked YT from loading on Goanna browsers.

[mukt@lemmy.ml]

This is good RAM for any 32 bit OS which is still being maintained.
64 bit OS require minimum 4 GB.

I don't think Google will like any 32 bit device though. Go for an older version from libreoffice.

[reversalhatchery@beehaw.org]

I'm not sure that cpu will be able to handle memory compression with a usable speed. I would expect it to make it even slower

[aliteralcabbage@feddit.uk]

Crunchbang was amazing, but it's sadly no more. Development stopped on it some time in 2015 I think.

Bunsenlabs is a direct successor to it, and should be good on OP's system.

[aliteralcabbage@feddit.uk]

Bunsenlabs is the successor to crunchbang.

[joekrogan@lemmy.world]

Good to know. I always liked #!

[aliteralcabbage@feddit.uk]

Ditto, I used it on my eepc 701 way back when. I miss that sort of computing experience!

[utopiah@lemmy.ml]

Why wouldn't Debian run?

Debian is the OS, with its package manager and some applications suggested by default. You can install Debian with X, without X, with a certain window manager or another, etc. So... Debian WILL 100% run, the question rather is WHICH software should you pick that gives the best compromise between ease of use (specific to that person) AND performance (specific to that computer).

PS: to be clear, that's the same for other distributions. There are distributions that specifically target older hardware and that in turn might facilitate the process but usually if you do check how such distributions are done, they are basically Debian (or NixOS or Alpine or whatever) with a specific package selection. It's rare (if ever? counter-example) to have anything special that would somehow "boost" performance for hardware, especially here when it's rather common hardware.

[utopiah@lemmy.ml]

FWIW I did run on old hardware with ratpoison and had a blazing fast experience, much more responsive than "top" hardware back then. So... yes IMHO it's about the wm/de usually, the rest follows. Obviously you can't run super demanding software, e.g. video editing, 3D modeling, etc but that's usually rather obvious.

[petter1@lemm.ee]

My friend always recommended puppy linux fur such devices, he was very happy with it

I personally think alpine might be a good fit, it is very lightweight. It does not use systemd though and is therefore in many ways different than most distros(for some this is a good thing). I know it from postmarketOS (optimised for phone hardware)

Other than that, you may just take Arch, as it comes pretty minimal and you can choose for every package to use the most lightweight solution

Or you can go even more personalised with gentoo, linuxFroScratch or yocto. Just requires some skill, but skill can always be acquired by learning and doing.

[ilikepigeons@lemmy.ml]

Yup, two years ago I installed Q4OS with TDE (basically KDE 3.5) on an old Penitum 4 1.8 Ghz computer with 2 GB of RAM and integrated graphics (Intel Extreme Graphics, part of the Intel 845G/845GL/845GE/845GV chipset as far as I remember). I wasn't pleasant, even just using the computer was sluggish.

[nyan@sh.itjust.works]

Unfortunately, modern web browsers are horrible pigs. No matter what distro you put on this thing, interacting with webpages will be s-l-o-w. (I have a similar laptop—2 GB RAM, Athlon64x2 CPU—running Gentoo, and while it's functional in its primary job of "larger-screen video iPod for 720p or less", starting a browser takes a while.) The niche your friend wants to make this machine fill is about the worst one possible for it.

[zod000@lemmy.ml]

Not exactly, when Crunhbang development ceased Crunchbang++ aka #!++came out and that distro is currently maintained. As far as I can tell #!++ is more of the same, which is a good thing. I had to retire my tired old eee pcs a long while back, so the NUC I replaced it with was fine with standard Debian since it had 16x the ram.

[wolf@lemmy.zip]

Show me some numbers! ... Perhaps I miss something, but basically we have 32bit pointers vs. 64bit pointers, the rest of the data should be the same size. 64bit should be faster for tasks where the CPU is the bottleneck/computations, so IMHO it will be an interesting tradeoff with no clear winner for me.

[wolf@lemmy.zip]

I don't know either, but unless one uses zstd (lzo seems more like a thing for this hardware), I would hope that it is totally usable. (Running zstd memory compression on a Raspberry Pi 2, w/o any noticeable speed impact)