I have an HP Stream 11 that I want to use for word processing and some light web browsing - I’m a writer and it’s a lightweight laptop to bring to the library or coffee shop to write on. Right now it’s got Windows and it’s unusable due to lack of hard drive space for updates. Someone had luck with Xubuntu, but it’s been a few years and it seems like Xubuntu is no longer trying to be a lightweight distro for use cases like this.
My experience with Linux is very limited - I played around with Peppermint Linux a bit back when it was a Lubuntu fork and I used Ubuntu on the lab computers in college. I can follow instructions to make a live boot and I can do an apt-get (so something Debian-based might be best for compatibility and familiarity) but I mostly have no idea what I’m doing, lol. I used to do DOS gaming as a kid so having to do the occasional thing via command line isn’t going to scare me off but I’m not going to pretend to have knowledge I don’t. I’m probably going to go with Mint on my gaming laptop next year but I suspect it’s not the best choice for my blue bezeled potato (although I might try it anyway).
I second Debian with LXDE. I run it on much older hardware with no issue.
Just something to note, LXDE is no longer officially maintained by the original devs (there are some community maintainers). LXQt is the new project from those devs and still seems to be going strong.
Not saying to avoid LXDE, just that updates may be few and far between.
I didn’t know that. I usually recommend LXDE because I have used it for a really long time. LXQt is also a great option, I haven’t used it in a few years but I remember it being nice and lite.
Debian + xfce.
This is probably the way to go. Relatively minimal install with a pretty lightweight DE. Rock-solid-stable too, so even if you update obsessively, you’re very unlikely to ever need to downgrade anything.
I actually went with this setup on a Dell M4500 and it works a treat, really gave the ol gal a second lease on life.
Devuan + xfce.
Devuan
Just no. Systemd can get more efficient than running hundreds of poorly integrated scripts and daemons to have a working system.
Note: this comment is long, because it is important and the idea that “systemd is always better, no matter the situation” is absolutely dangerous for the entire FOSS ecosystem: both diversity and rationality are essential.
Systemd can get more efficient than running hundreds of poorly integrated scripts
In theory yes. In practice, systemd is a huge monolithic single-point-of-failure system, with several bottlenecks and reinventing-the-wheel galore. And openrc is a far cry from “hundreds of poorly integrated scripts”.
I think it is crucial we stop having dogmatic “arguments” with argumentum ad populum or arguments of authority, or we will end up recreating a Microsoft-like environment in free software.
Let’s stop trying to shoehorn popular solutions into ill suited use cases, just because they are used elsewhere with different limitations.
Systemd might make sense for most people on desktop targets (CPUs with several cores, and several GB of RAM), because convenience and comfort (which systemd excels at, let’s be honest) but as we approach “embedded” targets, simpler and smaller is always better.
And no matter how much optimisation you cram into the bigger software, it will just not perform like the simpler software, especially with limited resources.
Now, I take OpenRC as an example here, because it is AFAIR the default in devuan, but it also supports runit, sinit, s6 and shepherd.
And using s6, you just can’t say “systemd is flat out better in all cases”, that would be simply stupid.
For the record. OpenRC is the default on Alpine Linux, which is probably run on millions of Docker installations.
And Docker initially used Ubuntu. They explicitly and specifically switched to Alpine in 2016 for performance, to minimise the overhead.
“systemd is always better, no matter the situation” is absolutely dangerous for the entire FOSS ecosystem: both diversity and rationality are essential.
I agree with this, however the rest is more open to discussion.
Systemd might make sense for most people on desktop targets (…) “embedded” targets, simpler and smaller is always better.
A few years ago I was working on a bunch of “embedded” devices (4 x ARM @ 800 Mhz + 256MB of RAM) and whatever we the popular alternatives and the truth is that only with systemd we were able to boot and have a usable system (timers, full dual stack DHCP/SLAAC networking network time, secure DNS) without running out of resources for our daemons later on.
The issue with sysvinit and OpenRC etc. isn’t that they aren’t good, it is that they’re simply init systems and nothing more. In order to have just the bare features above we would have to depend on tons of other small packages and daemons that would all eat up RAM and deal with all the integration pain because they weren’t designed to work together. Are you aware of the pain and number of things you’ve to setup to just have dual stack networking? With systemd you cut a lot of those smaller daemons and end up a few that have a much smaller RAM footprint and are actually made to work with each other.
Systemd also providers very useful features like socket activated services in that can be leveraged to have the system wait for incoming connections and once it gets one launch a program. Without systemd it would’ve been one more constantly running daemon. It also provided us the ability to monitor if all required services were running, kill things going over the line, restart on specific conditions and even trigger alerts.
Yes, you can do all of the above without systemd but the amount of stuff it required didn’t fit our 256MB target, nor the power budgets - we tried it, trust me. Besides all that without so many moving parts and by relying on systemd our solution was way more robust and easier to develop / debug.
Linux Mint Debian Edition. If you want to go more minimal, try Debian.
I’d go for Mint with XFce or xlde/lxqt for this one, or Lubuntu. Basically, you need anything that uses less than 700 MB of RAM (ideally around 350, like the Raspbery Pi version of Debian, but that doesn’t exist in the x86 world unless you go really low end, like DamnSmallLinux), and then you need to be very careful to not open more than 1-2 tabs on your browser, or you will start swapping. The biggest problem on your PC is not the speed, neither the size of the drive. It’s the 2 GB RAM. It’s a strict minimum of 4 GB these days to do adequate web browsing. But it’s still possible with 2 GB if you’re very careful what you’re loading, and how many tabs you’re using. My mom’s laptop has 2 GB of RAM too, and it’s equally slow in CPU speed, but it works for her, because she doesn’t know how to use tabs (she uses the browser with a single tab), and that’s enough at 2 GB.
And I know what I’ll suggest next is an anathema in these parts, but it’s true: Chrome uses less ram (there’s even a setting for it) and it’s significantly faster on older computers than Firefox. I have put together at least 8 old computers with Linux for friends and family, and that has been my experience consistently. On newer hardware it doesn’t make much of a difference, but on old hardware (e.g. anything less than 1500 Passmark CPU points, like yours), it does, visibly so.
Other suggestions: turn off start-up services on the xfce prefs about services you don’t need. For debian xfce, you will also need to edit a text file for policy-kit (somewhere on /usr) to make the laptop sleep on its own without intervention (otherwise it will tell you that it doesn’t have permissions to do so). Finally, Chrome might not load up on debian xfce, you will need to edit the launcher to include the basic password store chrome option, to make it load. Other ways to save RAM on xfce: include only 1 panel, don’t use applets you don’t really need, and use a color instead of a picture for background (you will be amazed how much ram that takes!).
Final advice: update the bios firmware via windows before you delete it. This will allow you to disable the fwupd service on linux, to save more ram (there are not going to be any new versions for that old model anyway).
Obligatory Bunsenlabs plug. Nice light Debian based distro with no DE. It cleverly uses openbox wm and tint2 and some other tricks to make it feel like you have one though.
Confirm it runs awesome on potatoes.
Debian and xfce, easy
Someone should come up with a new distro with the name potatOS, just for cases like this .
There’s already a bunch of distros for lower-end hardware. PuppyLinux is probably what you’re looking for, and it’s actually a genre of distro that takes a typical distro like SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch etc. and packages it into a slimmer spin with some shared utilities.
Ideally you would want something that sets up ZRAM, which is a way to compress your RAM. From what I’ve heard it can make your potato PC pretty swift but I haven’t set it up myself yet. I know Garuda linux does that by default. They also offer XFCE desktop which should be fairly lightweight.
MX Linux 32 bits (it’s debian+XFCE) will run fine, AntiX too.
DO NOT RUN A 32BIT VERSION OF LINUX ON 64BIT HARDWARE. I looked into the celeron in the computer, and it supports 64bit instructions. Just run Debian with xfce.
I run AntiX on my EeePC 701, the original with a 630mhz Celeron. Runs a treat.
Mint or Debian.
Xfce as desktop environment.
I have a stream 11 that I use as a little testing server and used to use as a laptop with Debian.
It ran fine, was too slow to stream from but certainly worked streaming to.
Using it now headless with rhel and it’s fine as that too, but I had to to the Broadcom-wl dance to get WiFi working.
My 1st recommendation for any potato PC is AntiX, however, since this one isn’t THAT potato and you’re gonna be using it for light writing and stuff, I’d say try Alpine… It’s out of the box experience is similar to arch, however you have automated install scripts for things like the desktop environment.
You could also try AntiX’s parent distro - MX linux or Linux Mint XFCE, both should work nicely.
Antix linux
I don’t play games but isn’t https://bazzite.gg/ the latest and best shit for gaming? If so, it would be good to try a live image of another atomic fedora image https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops . I’d recommend a tiling window manager because it uses less RAM. You can also easily start with KDE and rebase to a tiling window manager if it doesn’t work out as planned.
I use arch (btw) and always lie around tty. Id recommend the same for you, coz most my work, i.e programming (writing), anime and youtube can be done in tty itself. Id recommend highly any terminal based text editor. I enter GUI environment almost only for web browsing (if you guys know something for web browsing from tty, pls mention it) im gonna assume you need it more as a writer, and you are familiar with debian and not that familiar with dirty works on cli, so i cant recommend u to go with window managers like hyprland or something but if u want ram usage under 250M thats what u shuld use (i can help with setup and everything, if you want). So you may use debian with kde, ig.
I’ve done that on my potato, I installed Debian without a DE. It’s great, but I needed an insane amout of time to make it actually usable.
What do you mean by “make it usable”?
For example : I write in French. It wasn’t easy for me to have a way to type É or Ç. Tmux wasn’t easy to configure. It took time to understand how to use USB drives. And now I didn’t use it for some time, and I’d have everything to learn again if I had to turn it on.
I’m no computer scientist. All these things may be trivial for someone who works with computers, but it’s not my case 😅.
Totally understandable. 👍
Someone else mentioned the browser issue so I went looking for what was available (and I’ll probably try Firefox first), but I found Lynx, maybe that’s what you’re looking for?
Thanks. So u chose anything?
Not yet, I’ll try live booting some of the suggestions like Lubuntu, AntiX, and Debian (probably LXDE) and see which one works the best. Debian is about as much of a challenge as I’m willing to take on for this project, but I figure I’ll learn something at least, and if I do get it running it’s probably going to be solid. If all else fails I’ll look at a Puppy.
