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Best os choices and use cases for a netbook with 2ram?
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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Hm, 2GB RAM is a tough limitation. Even ChromeOS Flex has a minimum requirement of 4GB. I'm not saying it's impossible to find something that'll run with just 2GB, but you're probably not going to have any fun with it.
Plus, is the CPU even 64bit yet? Many distros have dropped their 32bit support already.
You can have a lot of fun with it. I assure you. And you can still command the cloud and much of the web (including LLMs) from such a machine.
With a text-mode editor, you can do a fair bit of programming. You could teach yourself Docker.
There are lots of entertaining games that would run on that machine.
If this was the only machine you had access to, you would be amazed at what it could do. We are spoiled.
That said, I agree that one overly heavy JavaScript web page could bring it to a crawl. Both things are true.
There are still a lot of 32 bit distros based off Debian (like Q4OS mentioned above). Debian no longer supports Pentium though. If you need that, go for Adelie Linux.
It's not hard to make Linux run on 2GB of RAM. The hard part is getting a web browser to run on 2GB without constantly swapping.
Define Linux. The most basic kernel for a given hardware set, a console emulator and a lightweight alternative libc busybox package? Yes.
An up-to-date desktop suite? Hardly so.
any distro with a lightweight desktop suite: xfce, lxqt, openbox, twms like sway....
as the guy said, internet browsing is more of a challenge, but can work on lightweight browsers, or if you limit ourself to just a couple of tabs.
I recently installed ChromeOS flex on a 2GB RAM device and it seems to work fine, it was an old EoL Chromebook though