I have an HP Stream 11 that I want to use for word processing and some light web browsing - I’m a writer and it’s a lightweight laptop to bring to the library or coffee shop to write on. Right now it’s got Windows and it’s unusable due to lack of hard drive space for updates. Someone had luck with Xubuntu, but it’s been a few years and it seems like Xubuntu is no longer trying to be a lightweight distro for use cases like this.

My experience with Linux is very limited - I played around with Peppermint Linux a bit back when it was a Lubuntu fork and I used Ubuntu on the lab computers in college. I can follow instructions to make a live boot and I can do an apt-get (so something Debian-based might be best for compatibility and familiarity) but I mostly have no idea what I’m doing, lol. I used to do DOS gaming as a kid so having to do the occasional thing via command line isn’t going to scare me off but I’m not going to pretend to have knowledge I don’t. I’m probably going to go with Mint on my gaming laptop next year but I suspect it’s not the best choice for my blue bezeled potato (although I might try it anyway).

  • TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
    1·
    7 months ago

    Obligatory Bunsenlabs plug. Nice light Debian based distro with no DE. It cleverly uses openbox wm and tint2 and some other tricks to make it feel like you have one though.

    Confirm it runs awesome on potatoes.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        Devuan

        Just no. Systemd can get more efficient than running hundreds of poorly integrated scripts and daemons to have a working system.

        • 7heo@lemmy.ml
          1·
          7 months ago

          Note: this comment is long, because it is important and the idea that “systemd is always better, no matter the situation” is absolutely dangerous for the entire FOSS ecosystem: both diversity and rationality are essential.

          Systemd can get more efficient than running hundreds of poorly integrated scripts

          In theory yes. In practice, systemd is a huge monolithic single-point-of-failure system, with several bottlenecks and reinventing-the-wheel galore. And openrc is a far cry from “hundreds of poorly integrated scripts”.

          I think it is crucial we stop having dogmatic “arguments” with argumentum ad populum or arguments of authority, or we will end up recreating a Microsoft-like environment in free software.

          Let’s stop trying to shoehorn popular solutions into ill suited use cases, just because they are used elsewhere with different limitations.

          Systemd might make sense for most people on desktop targets (CPUs with several cores, and several GB of RAM), because convenience and comfort (which systemd excels at, let’s be honest) but as we approach “embedded” targets, simpler and smaller is always better.

          And no matter how much optimisation you cram into the bigger software, it will just not perform like the simpler software, especially with limited resources.

          Now, I take OpenRC as an example here, because it is AFAIR the default in devuan, but it also supports runit, sinit, s6 and shepherd.

          And using s6, you just can’t say “systemd is flat out better in all cases”, that would be simply stupid.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.world
      1·
      7 months ago

      There’s already a bunch of distros for lower-end hardware. PuppyLinux is probably what you’re looking for, and it’s actually a genre of distro that takes a typical distro like SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch etc. and packages it into a slimmer spin with some shared utilities.