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submitted 2 days ago by GreatDong3000@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Friend has an old laptop with windows 10 that he doesn't use because too slow and freezing all the time. Wants to revive it to leave at his lab in grad school for browsing the internet and editing stuff on google docs so he doesn't have to carry his newer laptop everyday.

I suggested Linux but I myself always used Debian and I am not sure it will run decently with such low specs. Was thinking maybe Debian 11 with xfce or something? Any better options?

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[-] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 day ago

To be honest, I wouldn't on a 2Gb laptop. It'll run Linux just fine but the minute you use a browser or office suite you'll have memory problems.

[-] ILikePigeons@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 hours ago

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.

[-] limelight79@lemm.ee 4 points 21 hours ago

Maybe he's going to run Links and Wordstar!

[-] Disonantezko@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 23 hours ago

This!

Even 4GB RAM is low for web browsers and they're gonna struggle, A LOT, even with just one tab open, is going to be painfully slow to not want to use it anymore.

Old laptops like this, don't have hardware video decoders for YouTube or any video in AVC or HEVC códecs that is used everywhere today.

You can use Gnumeric for spreadsheets and Abiword for docs if Libreoffice is too slow.

[-] dx1@lemmy.ml 3 points 20 hours ago

Last time I checked (a few years ago) Firefox has half the memory usage of Chrome, in practice.

this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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