Need advice on a Linux distro

[Frisbyfreak420]

So I inherited an old hp prebuilt from my grandfather after he passed and it's just sitting around collecting dust because it's still running XP. I wanna put it to use as a garage pc that I can browse the web and maybe stream music while I work on my car. Problem is it's running what I'm assuming is an Allendale core 2 duo, because it's a dual core running at 2.4ghz and the time frame fits the bill, and I've only got 2gb of ram.

 

So what I'm looking for is something light weight that's gonna actually run slightly quicker than the speed of paint drying without sinking any money into what is essentially e waste.

[Slottr]

Tinycore, lubuntu, peppermint

[Sauron]

Any distribution should work fine, I haven't seen any that uses more than 500MB of RAM on idle out of the box - for particularly light distributions there are the ones @Slottr suggested and, more generally, anything using lxde/lxqt/xfce/mate/cinnamon as a desktop environment.

[Frisbyfreak420]

Awesome. Thanks 

[Alexeygridnev1993]

On 9/4/2020 at 10:26 PM, Sauron said:

Any distribution should work fine, I haven't seen any that uses more than 500MB of RAM on idle out of the box - for particularly light distributions there are the ones @Slottr suggested and, more generally, anything using lxde/lxqt/xfce/mate/cinnamon as a desktop environment.

Not really. Any distro with GNOME (like stock Ubuntu) will happily consume 1.5 GB of RAM, and even a system with KDE consumes around 800 MB.

[Sauron]

11 hours ago, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

Not really. Any distro with GNOME (like stock Ubuntu) will happily consume 1.5 GB of RAM, and even a system with KDE consumes around 800 MB.

Be careful not to confuse caching with actual required memory use. You can tell the difference with tools like free.

[WillLTT]

Puppy linux?

http://puppylinux.com/

 

i mean the most lightweight linux i know of is:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

 

DSL is old tho, i dunno if it has the necessary drivers & etc to work on that machine.

[Mystical Kimchi]

Frankly if you just want to browse the web and stream music, I would recommend FreeBSD (or maybe GhostBSD which gives a nice OOTB desktop installation) rather than Linux because I have found that it gives better performance than Linux on low-end hardware. But whether you go with Linux or BSD, the desktop environment makes a bigger difference than distro when it comes to resource usage. I'm a big fan of KDE Plasma 5 which is resource-efficient, but LXQt or Enlightenment are lighter-resource desktop environments if you need something even lighter.

 

Oh, and if you do go with FreeBSD, you'll probably want to use UFS instead of ZFS for the filesystem due to the low amount of RAM. ZFS will work, but some features like caching will be disabled.