It's an old model (Acer One D257) Processor is Intel Atom. Memory is 1GB DDR3 with 320 GB of HDD. I currently Have MX 21 running on it, but I need to reinstall because I forgot the root password. Since I'm reinstalling the OS, I thought I'd ask here for recommendations for an OS that makes the most of this oldie.
Debian based distros can be very different from each other. Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, etc are all based off debian. I think what the commenter you’re replying to is saying is to install the stock debian image, because that’s the lightest version of debian.
I used to like Debian based (and still do; I use it on my server with no intention of switching) but Opensuse is great on the desktop and supports 32 bit. Even tumbleweed is rock solid.
I’d recommend Alpine and running it headless. Realistically you’d need 4GB+ of ram to run a modern desktop session so that’s not ideal. However running Alpine headless will leave you with 800M to run programs.
You can still run a GUI desktop on it but I’d recommend having a nice sized swap partition/file to make up for it. It’ll be slow as soon as you hit the 1GB memory and starting swapping out.
It’s not the desktop that needs 4 GB, it’s large apps like modern browser or office. The desktop will run fine on 1 GB. May want to look into Midori and Abiword as alternatives.
If you can run the Raspberry Pi Desktop that would be good. Wayland and I think very light.
I am thinking about installing that on Fedora, rebranding and all, to have an actually small Wayland Desktop, because the current options are either WMs or bigger Desktops
Personally I am using a netbook like this as a headless server with Ubuntu.
You can try to run Lubuntu, or even TinyCore and Puppy Linux on this for simple tasks.
Generally speaking, with 1GB of ram and Intel atom, as you stay away from video streaming platforms and use simple tools for writing text or run simple code in python, you would be fine. However with less than 100€ you can find laptops with core i5 4rd generation with 8gb ram. I am not sure if it worths it.
I had similar netbook like OP and was running Lubuntu for a very long time but afaik they dropped support for 32 bit architectures some time ago. I think 18.04 was the last 32 bit LTS? Not sure, I’d need to check it
The only distro I could get to boot on my old Acer One was MX Linux.
It had the rare combination of 32bit UEFI support (cause the Acer supports neither 64bit UEFI nor legacy BIOS) and the necessary firmware out of the box.
But after upgrading it to the current release, it broke again. And then I threw the netbook away cause I have better things to do with my time.
That's a good point, I could jus try debian and remove the unnecessary stuff. I want my daughter to use this laptop so it needs some video codecs and hopefully some educational games.
Some commenters said you need a minimum of 2GB memory to run Debian. What do you make of that?
AntiX! Of course. I thought Antix had merged with Mepis to create MX. Didn't know they were still around. probably the best choice since it still seems to be based on Debian Stable
I put galliumOS on the laptop for my toddler… he likes it! But thats a specific distro for a specific netbook. Whatever you get, try GCompris, it’s a good collection of educational software
Because it does give me a functional piece of software to grab YouTube videos without actually opening YouTube, but it cannot really run Firefox with uBlock, which basically means web browsing is impossible
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