With those specs I wouldn't use it for anything other than a display for something, maybe a picture frame but more realistically I'd probably just take it straight to the recycling center.
What is the cpu? If something, zswap (250mb) with lz4 and zram (2gb on disk) with lz4 too, on a lightweight distro on btrfs with lzo compression might make it usable. Disk compression might make it usable on the disk side and memory compression might make it run at least not extremely bad on the cpu side. Maybe cachyos with gnome (i know, but it is the only DE with good touchscreen) can be at least usable.
If more things, I can try to help. I have a linux tablet.
Edit: Maybe more space (external sd card with btrfs and lzo) could be used as /home too, but only with more information given, what is the setup?
Edit: My config that I made it work and run decently:
I used to have an iMac that I loved (screen was excellent) but it quickly became a shitbox (because Apple) so I turned it into a X Server for my far more powerful Linux box. Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?
Edit: for kiosks, Windows 10 can be quite happy on 1GB RAM, but that 16GB storage is a problem.
Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?
Well, X is still out there with its thin client capabilities intact. There are Wayland-compatible VNC clients and servers, if one isn't big on X. SPICE is intended for connecting to VMs as servers. RDP if you want to use a Windows box as a server.
For a machine such as the OP describes, it would also be possible to install a tailored distro and software selection into the onboard space and place /home and such on a network drive, although that makes it impossible to take the tablet out of range of the LAN. If the touchscreen doesn't work under either the Wacom or libinput drivers, it would probably be a waste of time, though.
(Really, 16GB is plenty for the distro itself—if I remove the three kernel source trees, a couple of games, and some FreePascal stuff, my desktop system minus /home would fit in that, and it's anything but minimalistic.)
Gnome is probably best with touchscreen, KDE kinda works but is getting better. I've had limited success with Deepin and Cinnamon. I wouldn't bother trying with XFCE, they have no time to make something as low-demand as that work.
Touchscreen is a DE input function. Try KDE or Gnome, or just give up.
It’s easy to make it look like it could work. As for gnome/kde, with 1 Gb RAM that’s not an option
I dont know about Gnome, but kde plasma "should" run and be usable with 1GB ram. At least ive seen some posts about people doing it. I think at minimum you would need to customize your ram related kernel parameters like swappiness, the watermark scale factor (kernel memory threshold for caching) and stuff like that. But i cant say ive ever run such a small system with a DE.
Well then you won't have touch input. Resource limitations are a thing.
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