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Are you using systemd? Because 317 MB of RAM is really low for a normal Debian installation with XFce. At my mom's 2 GB ram laptop, it uses 850 MB on a cold boot.
It is because it is 32 bit. You can run a 32 bit distro on your machine too if you really want.
You can get a full Trinity desktop on Q4OS in 130 MB of RAM (32 bit edition).
I don't think the difference between 32bit and 64bit is 2x in memory sizes, it's way less than that. I run Q4OS, it runs at 350 MBs here.
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Yes the laptop CPU and RAM may be upgradeable but have you considered the parts availability? Considering its a 32bit CPU
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Celeron M with 2GB ram? That's actually not low at all :p
I bet it runs NetBSD or Tinycore flawlessly
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I've run Linux on a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM. There's not much modern software that will run on that hardware though.
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https://shop.hak5.org/products/shark-jack technically runs openwrt.
SoC: 580MHz MediaTek MT7628 mips CPU
Memory: 64 MB DDR2 RAM, 64 MB SPI Flash
Those are better specs than what I used throughout college (an Asus Eee PC running Debian with Xfce and Openbox). Not a powerful machine, but I absolutely loved that thing.
If Minix counts, I got it running on a 286 some years ago. I don't remember how much RAM it had, but it was very little.
My 2011 MacBook pro is still chugging along thanks to Linux.
I upgraded 4GB RAM to 16GB, upgraded the HDD to SSD, and replaced the CD drive with a second SSD. Sadly the screen is almost completely gone, occasionally intermittent, probably a cable gone bad, not sure, but the mini display port is working fine for an external monitor.
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I booted Buildroot with kernel 5.17 on a Pentium II laptop off a CD I burned once - I needed to dump a drive once and that was the only hardware I had on hand that could dump 2.5” IDE drives and had a working CD drive so I could boot something other than the operating system installed on the drive.
Are we competing again?
I'm proud to be setting up a rhel10 desktop, as it'll be the first time I ran Linux as a desktop in 30 years of a Linux/Unix career.
To rephrase: I ran XFree86 on a 4mb i386 machine 30 years ago.
What do I win?
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I suspect my first Linux ran on an 80mhz AMD K6. I did however also run it on a retired dual core UltraSPARC some years later I had somehow gotten my hands on. It might have been faster, but at that time it sure felt slow. And it sounded like a train passing through when it was on. In retrospect installing Gentoo on it was an optimistic endeavour.
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My daily driver at home has the same specs. Works fine.
Do you daily drive htop or something? 😆
No just top. Only with swap on....😉
Is this one of those old obscenely small obscenely underpowered net books?
This one is actually obscenely underpowered but obscenely large laptop
I got you beat with my HP Mini running a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 that I use to develop games for the open source physiotherapy gamification device I made for my kid when I'm on the train.
Don't want to carry my full-size gaming laptop to work just to do some light lua coding.
Ran Ubuntu 8 with Compiz and integrated graphics on a Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM. It was an awful machine, but Linux made it great to use. I still miss the peak of GTK2 + Emerald.
Mmmmm compiz. Wobbly windows, spinny cube virtual desktops, take me home!
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Considering they just dropped i486 support this year I’d say you’re running this on a super computer by comparison
amazing, well done! i run Debian on cheap used Thinkcentre PCs, run as k3s worker nodes just fine.
May I ask what are the specs and size of those Thinkcentres? I have one I'm using as a server and planning to upgrade the CPU because it has a dual core one, and someone offered me the same one I have, but it's pretty big. I'd prefer to use the tiny models when I can buy some :D
Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q, Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p
separate cheap newer N100 cpu node for jellyfin, other encoding
Intel NUC NUC8i5BEHS for k3s control plane, little more expensive but reliable.
i usually replace Thinkcentre fans w noctua for power draw, performance, and noise. and remove wifi module, not needed, draws power, closed blob firmware, is a risk. pops out easy, no config changes needed in Debian.
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I think the weakest computer I’ve had Linux on was an original Xbox running DSL.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 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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