Best Linux Distro for single core, low RAM, low storage laptop

check out both distros and then come to your own conclusion. The puppy linux FAQ is a bit off putting...why not just spell out the distro clearly?

Why? There's objectively no advantage to running 64 bit other than the ability to address more than 4GB of RAM without PAE. Otherwise, there is no advantage and apps typically run faster and with less memory footprint on 32bit.

Similar to how there is no advantage to multi-core processors in code execution unless the program implements threads. Most software is still single threaded even to this day. Without a specific use case, simply spreading instructions across cores adds latency and doesn't provide a huge speed increase. You really need to be able to offload entire independent sections of a program that can be run in parallel to make threads useful.

FWIW - I just spent some time updating an old Core2 with 2GB RAM just to see how it would run. It's been running Debian for years - currently 10. It's necessary to use a WM like MATE. The newer GUIs are too heavy and very slow. The system was really choking trying to run Chromium with a few tabs open - gets into swap right away. I added zram with 50% allocation and the system is surprisingly quite usable like this. It can just barely pull off playing a VP9 compressed 1080p YouTube video in a window. It runs much better with Firefox. It's necessary to use an ad blocker because the system really chokes on all the JavaScript.

I leave this thing kicking around mainly for guests to print plane tickets and check their email. It's sufficient for that but I think it would be pretty rough to use as a daily driver. It's just very slow by modern standards.

Two very recent puppy linux reviews from distrowatch:

1. Very lightweight distro, will resurrect any machine from many years ago, but that's all. It lacks many features, repositories are extremely limited, and many packages are out of date. Recurrent problems with certain hardware, which was my case, like audio card and bluetooth. I don't see it as a distro for ''home users'' as they claim, it seems more like it is for a very specific niche, who need something extremely light for some weak or old system. You can only use root, and it's extremely difficult to even change the password. I also encountered some problems where the terminal could not find CLI commands or identify apps, like vim. Very difficult to use as a daily drive. I've come to the conclusion that Puppy is not for me, but I wish good adventures for those who want to try it out.



2. Managed to boot the live iso from a dvd. While you try to install don't forget to set the boot flag on the partition from gparted otherwise your puppy won't boot. After copying files from live iso to my puppy partition i expected to set up a user and a password but i didn't get that kind of option so you'll have to use this puppy as root always. About the much advertised lightweight features of puppy i can tell you it's not quite the case as it uses over 500 mb memory without starting anything while artix linux uses with xfce only 270mb. As a bonus point puppy allows you to choose f2fs filesystem which is very good for usb sticks and ssd. For the graphical part i can't say much but is rather ugly it's true it's minimalist but slax is minimalist too and looks better. It uses it's own package management called pet and nobody really knows much about it. So i gave it a 9 not to add not to remove any points from the average rating to encourage the puppy linux team but i would give it an 8.

While I agree and also think Systemd flies in the face of the Linux software model (small programs tied together for bigger functionality) and also think Lennhert is a fuckwad, movement to SystemD is inevitable at this point. Too much core software tied into it that doesn't really work when forked and split out. I also think the forks are not maintainable long term. Devs will eventually get tired of backporting everything from SystemD.

Thanks fir the AntiX tip.

Would Ubuntu in a Virtual Box as a Windows guest - be able to host AntiX as a third-level guest?

Try AntiX, MX Linuxx, and Mint LMDE4. All 3 are debian based nonsystemd, and run great with the specs you outlined. Comes in 32 or 64 bit.

interesting question. I never took VB to that level...I only used it on mint systems to run win 7 when needed.

LXLE

It's ubuntu based for one and we've already had that discussion earlier in the thread. Second. I've personally tried it and promise that it would not be able to handle a single core 500 mb Ram system. Just check out the tech specs required. LXLE a middle of the road distro which is good, but not great in any particular area. It never enticed me to leave linux mint, even when mint 18+ came out and started to cause issues on old computers. I reverted to mint 17.3 instead. Only MX linux, AntiX, and mint LMDE 4 have enticed me to leave mint 17.3 .

Also, no 32 bit on the latest LXLE release. The 3 above have latest releases in both 32 bit and 64 bit laptops and are debian only nonsystemD distros.

I've had them all. Most of the offbeat distros don't have the software availability in their package managers I want. Additionally, DEBs are fairly ubiquitous with modern software so I don't need to jump through hoops to get things running. I don't have time to fight dependencies and compile my own software anymore.

This box had LMDE at one point but IMHO mint started falling behind a few years ago. I cut my teeth on Slackware in the 90s and used it until about 2009 or so. Debian has similar stability, a very large package base, and excellent ongoing support.

The box actually runs decently for browsing now. I just wouldn't want to do more than one thing at a time with this machine. Can't really handle it with the modern apps.

The most impressive distro I've tried recently is Manjaro. I really like it and considered making it a daily driver, but there is a lockup bug in 5.10 kernels that fucks the filesystem on my big tower (8 core xeon w/ 22GB RAM and a RAID). Might be better on newer hardware - the tower is pretty dated at this point.

A single core with 512MB is practically unusable these days. Maybe if you setup X with a lightweight WM like lxde and a lightweight browser but I think you'll have problems playing video. IMHO 4GB RAM and a Core2 is absolute bare minimum to run a functional modem browser in 2021.

An old machine like that might be better used as a client for something like nomachine or x2go.

good info, but things have really changed since then. I would definitely revisit Mint LMDE 4 and MX Linux (which has been #1 on distrowatch for over a year).

Like I have been saying and the single purpose of this thread, AntiX has made this single core, 500 mb Ram laptop run blazing fast. I am using it as a type this. Very happy with it! No heat, no glitches, no hangups...and plenty of tabs open... I'm running palemoon 28.3 as a browser and have all my favorite extensions running from old/pre webEx firefox... it's insane but totally awesome!!

Hahahaha the front page of antix:

"Proudly anti-fascist "antiX Magic" in an environment suitable for old and new computers."

You've got to fucking be kidding me. Distros are political now? I'll pass.

Plus it uses IceWM which is more like a window manager for a kiosk than a real working environment.

it totally predates (by over a decade) all this political bullshit, so no, it hasn't appropriated any of the antifa shit.

as for rox-icewm...check it out. It looks/responds like a very contemporary working environment.

There is no harm sticking it on a live stick and trying it for some old laptop with a single core and 500 measly mb of ram.

I can tell you never read the first post of this thread. It's a shame that you are commenting on a thread that you haven't even superficially read. The point was that this distro works blazing fast on this super old computer and it is very up to date and featureful...

Try Slackware

Puppy is single user as root, no systemd operating system. If you come from another linux it will confuse you. Whats good about puppy is that you can do anything you want, nothing will be there to tell you no. Most people that use puppy linux on a regular basis hated it when they first tried it but came back to it when they couldn't force the pretty linux to do what they want. Its not for most people.

Which linux you use (if you are one of the 1% that uses it) depends on your level of knowledge, there are easy versions and there are hard versions and everything in between.

:)

Thanks for your comment. Yeah...tried it, but I'm not into it. I much prefer debian.

You can? Do tell.

The point of the thread was to share my experience with a contemporary, polished, new release up-to-date 32 bit debian only distro that can make a single core, 500 mg ram laptop run exceedingly well. That's the point. It's pretty amazing! That was the point.

OK Great.

Well, I'm a programmer, so I see things a bit differently. You say "there's objectively no advantage" because programmer's have worked hard to get things to (mostly) work even within the tight limitations of a 32-bit address space.

There are two things at work here. One is the actual amount of memory used. And the other is the amount of address space used. You see, a program can claim a chunk of memory addresses for later use, and the memory to back that address space will only be doled out by the OS if and when it is actually used.

This produces a lot of flexibility. There are many reasons for a program to want to reserve a HUGE address space, even when it only ever uses a small portion of it. This is a perfectly fine practice under a 64-bit OS, but must be avoided at all costs under a 32-bit OS. So programming feels limited and restricted with 32 bits.

But apart from the convenience and pleasure of the programmer's, there's also the fact a 32-bit address space is only just about enough for many tasks. Even with PAE, a single process can still only access max 4 GB. And that means it can realistically not use much more than 2 GB before running into issues with fragmentation.

2 GB was a lot 20 years ago. Now it's TIGHT AS FUCK!

It's like having a two foot wide and five foot high door to your house. You can squeeze in there if you remember to mind your head. And you can get most of your furniture in there too. But sooner or later you'll try to get a coach in there that just won't pass the tight opening.

That's what 32 bits is like today. Sure, it suffices for most simple tasks. But it doesn't SCALE. It's very easy to run into problems with too little headroom.

If you're doing scientific computing, or content creation, then 32 bit just doesn't cut it. I have 32 GB in my audio workstation, and yes, it's actually needed when I run large orchestral sample libraries!

Modern games also usually require at least 8 GB these days to run their best. But for reasons of memory fragmentation, that means they really need about 16 GB of address space, which means a process needs 34 bits of virtual addressing. 32 bits is just a tiny bit too little, just like that five inch door!

As time goes on, more and more things are bound to demand more address space than a 32-bit OS can handle. Even a mundane thing like a web browser gobbles up a lot of RAM! A test of web browsers found that Firefox uses 3.9 GB when you open 60 tabs! I sometimes have more tabs than that going, so I clearly need my 64 bits even just for web browsing...

You can still do some simple things with 32 bits, if you hold down your head so you don't hit the post, but it has no future.

Not even on a phone.

Thank God there are still distros around that bring old 32 bit laptops and computers back to life. Without them, we'd have to throw away alot more revivable hardware than we currently do. That is the singular reason to offer 32 bit versions and it's a noble reason indeed. It's also the primary reason people make live usb drives and explore all the distros that they do. Very few people would risk futzing around on their high value computers with their high value data. On stuff that doesn't work anyway? Sure! No harm, no foul. It's been a win-win-win-win all around and I believe one reason why Linux has become a serious player in the past decade.

XP doesn't work anymore?
I have a couple computers in my junk room with
XP on them and they work just fine.
Best OS Microsoft EVER designed.
I still prefer it over any other OS.

Of course you can't use it online anymore.
They torpedoed that idea long ago.

Precisely that. XP isn't up-to-date anymore and if it does work, it's glitchy. 32 bit linux distros that are up-to-date aren't glitchy and you can surf the net, read emails, watch video's, comment on GLP, etc...

Slitaz. No bloat for you.

Tried it. Didn't really like it then (6+ years ago). Nonetheless, I can certainly give it another shot, which I will do if the reviews are decent on distrowatch. When I come into more old hardware, I'll definitely try it again.

Thanks for the reminder!

Linux sucks. For a lightweight and secure operating system use Windows 10 or 11.

Huge memory allocations are just poor and lazy programming practice. Linux memory overcommit is partially responsible for this coding practice. But, as previously stated, the only actual advantage to 64bit is accessing more than 4GB of memory.

I'm sure there are some legitimate uses of large memory footprints but I doubt sound samples are one of them. Maybe protein folding or other intensive scientific or mathematical uses. Whatever audio software is being used is probably poorly programmed.

In fact, using browsers as an example, both Firefox and Chrome are horrendously guilty over abusing memory allocations and overcommit. So much so, that these apps readily fail on low end hardware - not because the hardware is incapable of providing enough resources but because the browser wants 256MB for every tab opened whether it uses it or not. I would point out that we were rendering web pages on Windows 3.1 with 4MB (yes, Megabytes) of RAM and while pages have become more functional and complex, we were achieving similar results with Java, Flash and ActiveX in a time period when 256MB was a "lot" of RAM.

The laptop I was talking about with zRAM was allocating 1.5GB for Chrome with like 2 tabs open one being this site and the other YouTube. That's pretty bad, if you ask me.

That's funny...

I'm a fan of BodhiLinux. [link to www.bodhilinux.com (secure)]

Very light weight and intuitive.

Sadly, Bodhi is ubuntu-based so it eliminates itself. The rationale was already presented in this thread, with links....