Linux distro for old mini PC

[Jmtzaguirre]

A few years ago I bought a Minix NEO N42C-4 together with an additional 4 GB of DDR3 memory (8 GB in total) and a basic 256 GB WD Green M.2 SATA SSD. It is currently collecting dust and I'm thinking about using it again for light tasks (web browsing, managing my Unraid home server, etc.).

 

I remember that at the time W10 became a bit too much for the (soldered) Intel Pentium N4200 CPU, so I'm wondering if a light Linux distro would feel snappier. Do you have any particular recomendations in this regard? Even though this question might be more appropriate in the "new builds" section, should I increase the RAM up to 16 GB or would I be throwing my money away? Thank you all in advance!

[mMontana]

You can test a lot of distro with your current setup, and evaluate the results.

One distro you can try is Linux Mint, XFCE edition.

[Cosmic Emotion]

If used as a couch gaming system check ChimeraOS, otherwise something like Garuda Gaming Edition should be more than fine.

[thevictor390]

Something to keep in mind, pretty much every OS uses the same web browsers nowadays so specifically for web browsing it doesn't always make a huge difference (provided you have enough RAM, which you do).

[BankHealthy]

Almost any distro would run well on this. Try Ubuntu first or Linux Mint. 16GB of RAM is a lot of RAM for Linux, unless you plan to game.

[Jmtzaguirre]

Thank you all! I'll try Mint this weekend and see how it goes.