I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
You need something like DamnSmallLinux, not Debian. Debian users about 800 MB of RAM with XFce, on a clean boot. It requires a minimum of 2 GB with a modern browser (one tab, 4+ GB with more tabs). DamnSmallLinux uses about 128 MB RAM on a clean boot, and with the Netfront browser about half a gig. Definitely better for such a laptop than any modern distro.
Antix linux would also work great, and DSL is based on it.
If you use mechanical hard drive in it, it worth a try to replace it with an SSD. After that, Debian should run much better.
Hopefully it got standard SATA connector.
You can buy IDE m.2 converter. There are usb to floppy converters, usb drive shows up as floppy drive. You can attach modern peripherals to old computers, this kind of retro world with modern and old parts mixed is funny.
Would it worth, though? I mean, is there a significant difference on IDE between HDD or SSD? With an adapter, SATA speeds on the long run would be bottlenecked by IDE if I’m correct.
Yeah, it’s not quick, there is no noticeable difference in speed. Random read should be much quicker. But you can’t really buy ide hdds anymore and they will die sooner or later, and the price of small m.2 sata ssds are falling.
without any checking of course, I assumed that machine is “new enough” to have some form of SATA in it, but good point
Yeah the machine is 32-bit, so it’s a question worth asking.
either you go the easy route and use a distribution targeted towards low spec systems like damn small linux or you go the difficult route and implement the same measures that they implement onto your debian installation.
last time i was in your situation i ended up doing both and i’m glad i did because my version of the build never worked as well as the custom distro.
AntiX
Oh yeah, I completely forgot, that laptops real old, so go ahead and regrease the cpu.
JWM is my suggestion. It’s a floating window manager (not tiling) that doesn’t require almost any knowledge or key bindings to use and it has all necessary stuff included out of the box afaik. You can also use xdgmenumaker to make the right click/Start menu better.
It seems like you’ve got plenty of choices already, but how about an OS that’s already been cut down to work on the limited RAM of a Raspberry PI? It bills itself as a good alternative for limited hardware.
I have that exact machine in my electronics “graveyard”.
Peppermint OS was my GO-TO for speed and driver support out of the box. You can also stick in a 2GB SODIMM of ram. It will only recognize 1.5GB but still 50% more ram.
Antix linux is a very begginer friendly distro with very light specs
Try antix. its requirements are 256mb ram. And it’s actually usable.
Compile your own kernel for those atom processors and they work much better.
It’s not hard, there’s a text interface for it where you just pick what to do from a list.
I have a similar device Intel atom, 1gb RAM. I installed arch and use it as a headless computer (without DE/WM). If I need WM I use sway. Use a minimal browser like Qutebrowser. Although it would also run like shit but better than chrome/firefox.
Oooh. So I keep a Dell Mini 10 (1GB RAM, ~1GHz Atom) around with Haiku on it. It’s brilliant! The UI is super snappy even on such an old machine, and I can even run pretty modern software on it. I used it yesterday to work on my website a bit. :)
Use Dietpi as your main distro, do a minimal install, install sway and then your usual stuff.
t. Got a orange pi zero 3 w/ 1GiB of ram, did exactly as my suggestion implies and everything works as intended.
I have something like that running Haiku. Try it, you’ll be surprised.
