The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?

       sudo modprobe zram 
       sudo zramctl --find --size 512M
       sudo mkswap /dev/swap0
       sudo swapon /dev/zram0 -p 99

I run vanilla Arch with niri (Wayland), Waybar and a few other tools to create a desktop environment. I didn't do any special kernel or app specific tweaks for performance.

The machine boots using 1.1 GB of memory and total disk space after installing a bunch of apps is ~10 GB. Browser, Docker, video editor, image editor, LibreOffice, OBS, VMs, a ton of CLI tools and everything you'd expect to have a fully working and usable system is there.

It's a wonderful environment on 2014 era hardware. Granted I have 16 GB of memory but it would be fine with 8 GB even when running non-trivial Docker based projects and doing 1080p video editing.

Even Silksong runs at 60 FPS with a GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB) GPU. Although I splurged on a used AMD RX 480 (8 GB) to get more things to run nicely in parallel. Wayland is very picky with limited GPU VRAM, especially with NVIDIA cards.

I also run the same set up on a more modern laptop with way better hardware but things aren't much faster unless I'm very CPU bound.

Everything to get the system up and running in 1 command and 10-15 minutes is here: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice

Thanks for this link!

"antiX is my top pick for truly constrained hardware. It runs on systemd-free Debian Stable, uses around 256MB at idle, and includes a full desktop experience. The trade-off is a less polished interface compared to Ubuntu-based options. If you need something even lighter, Puppy Linux runs entirely in RAM and can resurrect machines that most distros would reject. The learning curve is steeper, but the performance is unmatched."

I would actually recommend Bodhi Linux for under 2GB. https://www.bodhilinux.com/ I installed AntiX on a 2GB Chromebook, and it had issues crashing on browsers under even a couple tabs. It might have just been the laptop I bought from Goodwill, or the fact that I disabled swap, because it was an old 16GB soldered SSD/NAND drive that I wanted to avoid heavily writing swap space to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhozuNv-J7Q

Bodhi is more featured with a more conventional package manager than Puppy, and while I like booting from RAM, it's learning curve is a little steeper and less maintained than Bodhi, which is getting a new release soon: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodhilinux/comments/1qqrfyj/is_bodh...

I did a video with Bodhi on Virtual box with 1GB since I didn't have the Chromebook with me at the time, but it idles around 350MB (possibly before Chromium running): https://youtu.be/61xI-g--ozs?si=y7ukxyEGSj_kNPF7

For additional package manager support, a nice UI (Enlightenment) and compatibility, it's far more preferrable than 250MB ideling on AntiX with less support.

For Atom N450 series, I recommend eXe Linux: https://exegnulinux.net/ I have a video of that too.

I hadn't heard of BunsenLabs, but I will definitely check it out (Note: Atom N450 chips support 64 bit, even on single core, so they might work great on those machines)

It is astonishing to me just how bad end user software has gotten over the past twenty years. It's just goofballs. It's not like that point was when software started requiring more resources, the "What Andy giveth Bill taketh" aphorism was coined in the 90s after all. Software gets complicated over time. Every bug fix or added input validation or whatever adds code. That's fine and appropriate. Convenience and integrity add code/complexity. That's not what I find so bothersome.

I find 2006 an interesting horizon. It was then that the average home computer massively jumped in processing power compared to the software running on it. For the vast majority of users the computer spent more idle time waiting for input than users waited for output. Of course for some users there's never enough power but for most all of their tasks were effectively instant. Even heavyweight (for the time) stacks like Java ran incredibly well. He'll even Emacs could run well!

Then the curve seemed to invert. Hardware kept getting more capable with even faster CPUs, more cores (on common consumer machines, and more RAM. As the article points out a "lightweight" Linux DE with native apps really flies on such hardware.

But more development seemed to move to the web. More JavaScript required more powerful JS engines and those are up more and more memory. More shit loaded into the DOM means more and more objects on the heap with more pointer chasing.

Modern stacks are really only fast because modern computers brute force their way through them. A simple CRUD type task that fly as a VB or Delphi (neither stack performance kings) app on Windows 2000 now requires a 2GHz dual core CPU with 4GB of RAM as a baseline thanks to it now being a web app.

Using a twenty old machine with native applications and the CLI feels to me like a super computer compared to the computers I first used (Apple IIs). A Core 2 Duo is a stupidly powerful CPU for most tasks. If you can get by with a command line workflow even a Core 2 Duo is crazy fast.

/soapbox

You don't even have to go that old. There are so many companies that upgrade tiny pc's its created a whole self hosting community with the tiny lenovo, hp and dell unit's. It's not only Windows that can be replaced with old hardware but also many online services with proxmox for cloud/nas/dns/vpn/multimedia etc. Of course these are not 2GB systems but you can do some pretty cool things with 8 and 9 year old systems that are literally decommissioned because they are too old. Although a friend of mine who works for a MSP gave me a Lenovo m710q tiny a month ago and its made a pretty good Debian Desktop for my workbench in the garage. I lucked out there because even these tiny's are now going up in price. People have caught on.

And not a word about MGLRU and its settings. It has the biggest impact on performance on lower-end PCs, especially with low amount of RAM and slow HDD.

Here's a post from "le9" patch user which was created by ChromeOS developers much before MGLRU, but exploits the similar idea: keeping the essential file cache in RAM for as long as possible. It's usually night and day on low-end machines.

    - https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1267300-le9-strives-to-make-linux-very-usable-on-systems-with-small-amounts-of-ram?p=1267789#post1267789
    - https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1267300-le9-strives-to-make-linux-very-usable-on-systems-with-small-amounts-of-ram?p=1268100#post1268100

For older hardware: Void Linux, Xubuntu or maybe Linux Mint Xfce. If you want something up to date that needs to be online.

AntiX and Puppy Linux are a bit too rough, in my opinion. I'd rather leave the machine with some fully updated old Windows version designed for that hardware, offline. Works very well for retro gaming, ripping CDs and stuff like that.

I had a similar experience trying to use an old laptop with 2GB of RAM. I was surprised how much it struggled with basic tasks. I remember my first computer with 32MB of RAM. Obviously we live in a different world now but still, it's not like I was trying to do anything more ambitious than what I used to do on that PC.

Anyone remembers Ross technologies ?

When I was a student mucking around the trashed corner of a retired hardware room, I found a very dusty box that looked promising. It was a Ross hyperstation.

I was able to install Arch Linux and Debian on it. But I think it had some corrupt RAM and would crash after a few days if lucky or hours if not. That was a pity. This was the first system where I could see 4 cpus and had got pretty excited. This was a time when there were rumours of Intel dual cores going around. I was planning to run it as our NFS file server.

I was able to bootstrap GCC on it too, after a few tries.

The overall sentiment expressing the growing gap between software needs and hardware capabilities is sound. This is where FOSS projects shine who put deep thought into providing the same features modern users need into an OS that can intelligently utilize older computing resources. I've been in the industry since the Nineties and it still amazes me how many companies invest so little into backward-compatibility and performance during their OS and application design process.

I've had my Panasonic Toughbook (CF31-5) for almost 10 years and while it's a dinosaur to some, it's a major upgrade from what I had before in terms of portable computing. Its max memory is 16 GiB DDR3 SDRAM on an Intel Core i5-5300U. When I first bought it I tried Debian and Ubuntu, but even back then those ran slow. I installed Xubuntu and have run that ever since with no performance issues whatsoever.

Because I primarily use Emacs and TeX tools, writing Elisp and LaTeX, the system is more than enough for me. I've not played graphics-heavy games, run GPU-intensive UI or done any heavy data plotting. However, one benchmark I do have: I am able use the test automation framework required for my day job with ease. I run that software on Xubuntu because on my work-provided systems (Windows 11 and macOS Tahoe) the application crawls and is practically unusable.

Don't get your OS recommendations from an LLM-generated article.

The post is missing a section about video cards.

My old laptop from 2006 has an ATI x1600. I remember that I lost v sync with kernels past 3.something so I had to put the kernel on hold while the other packages updated around it. That was around 2012. Maybe the issue is fixed by now but old graphic cards can make an old PC run only as a headless server. It's been years since I booted it.

    <driconf>
         <device driver="i915">
         <application name="Default">
         <option name="stub_occlusion_query" value="true" />
         <option name="fragment_shader" value="true" />
         </application>
         </device>
    </driconf>

I use Pop_OS! on my old 2014 Macbook Pro (16 GB LPDDR3, i5-4278U with 4 cores). It runs superbly with Gnome3. Given that it is 12 years old now and the latest supported macOS version with opencore legacy patcher was stuttering and unusably slow, there is a second life now for the machine. I mostly use it as a headless home server, the built in battery serves as UPS, keyboard and trackpad make it easier to setup and debug things.

I changed the battery myself (50€ replacement from Amazon) and it looks as good as new (one benefit of the aluminum chassis and glass display is that they can be cleaned quite well). Hardware support from Linux for those intel machines is great nowadays: WiFi, Bluetooth, trackpad etc all work.

Slackware and Hyperbola GNU/Linux still run fast. Just pick XFCE instead of KDE under Slackware.

Deselect KDE if you don't need it. If the machine is old, it's better to use XFCE and install the rest later.

If you install and setup slapt-get you might install some nice KDE/Plasma software later to run under KDE. Then you can set the QT5 theme to GTK2 under /etc/profile.d/qt.sh (chmod +x it) and this content:

        export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2

Slackware is not 100% free but you can compile a libre kernel from FSFLA with ease and drop it into the UEFI partition or /boot and run the required grub/lilo/elilo command later.

I’ve got a 15 year old workstation that I’m breathing new life into, but fortunately starting from a higher baseline. 24GB of RAM is going to 96GB, and it turns out it should be able to use an NVMe drive, so have a card and an M2 drive on the way. The annoying thing is that the GTX 460 is no longer supported by the Nvidia driver so I’m back to nouveau. That might get replaced with something more modern. I had an old Mint installed and decided to blow it away with stock Debian, and Claude’s setting up nix VMs for itself to run in. It has been crazy how $4k in 2011 for an SR-2 system has yielded a long productive life for this box.

The swapiness section is incorrect. If I remember correctly swapiness does the same thing for swap and zram, which is how quickly the given partition starts to fill up. So for swap on hard drives you want it as low as possible, so you're using swap as late as possible. For zram you kinda really want it as high as possible, especially when the amount of ram is low, so it starts compressing early.

Some Android OEMs experimented with zram swapiness over 100, up to 200, so it would start compressing immediately.

Since 2026 began, I have turned a fifteen year old MacPro4,1 into a Ubuntu 24 powerhouse (using a 2019 GPU with HBM2). Before this, I knew little about computers not running macOS. Although I grew up on Macs, and have three modern Silicon machines... my old MacPro is again my daily driver (because: Linux).

It's incredible that this ancient machine runs Ollama3.1 faster than my M2Pro/M3/M4 machines (entirely due to the GPU, still "ancient" by modern standards).

I enjoy collecting old ThinkPads and other Notebooks, and I wanted to clarify a few points about 32-bit vs. 64-bit support.

The last true 32-bit processors were the AMD Athlon XP and Intel Pentium 4 (early Core Duo models also had 32-bit variants). ThinkPad series like the T6x, T4x, R5x, and X3x/X4x are limited to 32-bit. Meanwhile, models like the X2xx and newer generally support 64-bit and run modern distros like Debian or Fedora smoothly, often this models have at least 2GB of RAM and 64GB+ storage.

The article's title feels a bit misleading to me. It's more about limited resources (RAM/storage) than truly "old" hardware. In my view, the defining factor for "old" should be 32-bit processor support, which is far more restrictive than storage or RAM constraints. Usually the 32-bit systems are better typewriter. They don't have enough power the browse smoothly the modern web.

For 32-bit systems, I usually go with Q4OS (great for old hardware compatibility) or Puppy Linux (unlimited 32-bit support). For 64-bit, it's Fedora (Sway) or Debian (GNOME). I choose these distros because I want to get the manual installation and setup done in under an hour. Worth noting: many distros still support 32-bit, but some (like Debian) are phasing it out by 2028.

One relevant thing to check with older hardware: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/631217/how-do-i-che...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...

Nice to see BunsenLabs getting some love - smooth way into a GUI Debian

I prefer Boron over the more recent Carbon due to some of the panel changes (although presumably this is all configurable somewhere)

https://ddl.bunsenlabs.org/ddl/

Boron also probably requires this fix:

https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?pid=144667

I love using older hardware in this way but browsing the web on an old laptop is PAINFUL. Even with a light browser and adblock websites are dog slow. Something like Google Maps or Google Docs becomes unusable. I am not against JavaScript on the web by any means but something needs to be done about basic document pages and forms and tables that by all means should fit into 1MB of RAM at most but take half a gig.

I like running Linux on older Dell Optiplex systems that you can buy off of Ebay. They usually come with 8GB ram, 256 or 512 SSD and usually 4 to 6 cores (maybe 8). All of the ones I bought use Intel CPUs.

They run Debian or Ubuntu great although I usually run them headless and just SSH into them. One experiment I did was with Talos / K8s with about 3 of these and it worked great.

Swap the HDD for an SSD first makes more difference than the distro choice.

Great post. I just revived an old PC as well that was gathering dust by installing Linux on it. Also upgraded the hardware from a i3-6100 using iGPU + 8GB RAM to:

- i5-6600K (€20 used)

- ASUS STRIX RX 480 8GB (€20 used)

- 16GB DDR4 (€50 used)

€90 all in for an incredible Linux machine that still runs games great at 1080p. Probably even that amount of RAM was overkill, but it's 3200Mhz instead of the old 2133Mhz.

I don't know how a "complete" guide can completely fail to mention NVIDIA. It doesn't seem straightforward to support older NVIDIA cards (on any OS, to be fair, not just on Linux). That's currently one of the issues with my 2013 Dell laptop that has a Quadro K1100M.

It's cool to see your interest in running Linux on highly constrained systems. I might check out eXe Linux, since I spent a bit of time messing with Linux on my Cr-48 Chromebook, which has an Atom N455.

Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?

Here's my own blog post covering Arch Linux on the Cr-48: https://dansalva.to/resurrecting-a-prototype-chromebook-with...

Note that since my writing of that post, i915 graphics support in Wayland has been fixed, so it's now viable to run a Wayland DE if desired.

> and it had issues crashing on browsers under even a couple tabs.

Surely this has way more to do with the browser (and the website!) than the OS, nowadays.

How's Alpine? Most of the containers seem to pick Alpine as the basis OS.