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

[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.