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?
There are a lot of old Chromebooks with only 2GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard. Other than that, they're surprisingly capable machines after you flash them with MrChromebox firmware.
Intel mobile chipsets for Core 2 Duo only supported 2 or 4GB. And not all the desktop chipsets supported 8 or 16GB. I have a laptop with 3GB: one of the slots only supports 1GB.
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.
I had never heard of it, but checking it, I see MGLRU is enabled by default on my kernel (Mageia 10 with 6.18.xx). Are there distros where this is not enabled? Especially the ones mentioned in the blogpost? In that case it would need a recompile of the kernel, right? Or send in a bugreport to the distro.
For HDD, it also needs to be tuned. In its default configuration, MGLRU 'just' manages multiple generations of working sets, but there's a min_ttl_ms tunable which tries hard to prevent file cache from being reclaimed, which is not enabled by default.
You'd want to set it to 300 or 500, or even 1000 for the HDDs. Around 100-200 for SSDs/EMMCs helps as well.
And for anonymous pages swapping, you'd want to do that on zram (compressed swap in RAM). It also make wonders. You don't want to touch the (old) disk for that.
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.
I have one Nvdia system where it's locked to their drivers in BIOS meaning I can't use AMD. Now Ubuntu has dropped support for old GeForce it's essentially a brick, thanks Nvidia and Canonical.
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.
Its a pathetic world.. and sad.. I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory
commit is 370MB.. If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling, I really get shivers... WTF?! How is that even possible? Bloat is astronomical and yet.. Most people just does NOT care...
> I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB..
In what context?
>If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling
Modern Gnome and KDE distros with batteries included also idea at around 2GB RAM which is a useless metric anyway as Windows 11 also preloads frequently used takes and apps on boot.
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.
What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler.
Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?
The older Intel-based Dell XPS 13 machines have the same footprint as some 11 inch Chromebooks. Some models have thermal quirks that cause a shutdown, which is easily addressed by lowering the CPU frequency. Battery life is pretty good (but I replaced the batteries before I realized the CPU issue was the culprit).
You’ll need to look at chromebook that can have a linux distro on it. I like the a good keyboard width so 14 inch laptop are my sweet spot. I have a latitude 7490 (which I wouldn’t recommend as it have an hardware design flaw ( it freeze when held one handed)) and it’s light.
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.
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.
Honestly it comes down to what do you mean by using Linux. In 2026, or well at least since the mid 2010s, the biggest hurdle will be the web browser. Do you need that? If yes then you are already in the higher system requirement pool. If not then pretty much anything goes, like the options I mentioned above. And even then you can use curl, wget, aria2 etc to access online content to some extent
> And you can go even smaller with TinyCore Linux or the xwoaf-rebuil
Sure, but in this time and age, do they really have to settle for such extreme 90s looks as defaults? I mean, Windows XP Media Center Edition can surely be considered as "lightweight" today and it featured the gorgeous Royale theme back in 2005.
Yeah, this is what always surprises me with modern software targeted towards low-specced computers.
Windows XP run fine in 256MB ram computers yet it could be altered to make it look fantastic, with the Royale or Royale Noir themes.
I guess even Linux back then could be made beautiful on similarly specced computers. Yet, AntiX or even LxQt is hideous despite consuming more resources!
I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of customization. I think partially it's down to the platform many use (many seek to theme mobile OSes), but the tools to do so has to be a large contribution. I'm not aware of anything like Stardock's Skin studio that exists outside windows, and from looking at their website it's now useless for anything past win10 1909. Having their art seen on widely used platforms (OS or applications) has to be a large draw to it as well.
Otter Browser it's uber light, but for proper support you might need to build it against the qtwebkit/qtwebengine plugin (I can't remember, but one of the two engines was the most modern one). If not, I have Dillo+MPV+ytdlp/streamlink for video sites. More than often
if you works. Also, I have gemini://gemi.dev (Dillo plugin) for the news sites tunneled over Gemini and some nice Gopher sites such gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org
It's interesting how on a server 2 GiB of RAM can get you quite far, however on a desktop that's pretty much the minimum feasible amount. It used to be the opposite: servers needed plenty of RAM and CPU compared to desktops
Personal servers never needed much in the way of resources. They only did, and still do, when you have a lot of simultaneous users. The database servers at Google or Microsoft don't have 2GiB of RAM. They plausibly have 2TiB.
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.
>The honest assessment: If the machine cannot run a lightweight Linux desktop at a usable speed after you have applied the optimizations in this guide, it is time to recycle it responsibly. Most municipalities have e-waste collection programs. Do not throw it in the trash. The components contain recyclable metals and toxic materials that need proper handling.
This is the whole point.Linux helps in that judgement whether to keep or throw the box.
If you can't run linux you can always run netbsd. or any *bsd.
Besides the advice on ditching hardware on account of thermal problems is .. terrible. If you went so far as installing obscure linux distros, surely unscrewing a few screws and applying a vacuum and then some thermal paste isn't out of reach.
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?
There are a lot of old Chromebooks with only 2GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard. Other than that, they're surprisingly capable machines after you flash them with MrChromebox firmware.
Intel mobile chipsets for Core 2 Duo only supported 2 or 4GB. And not all the desktop chipsets supported 8 or 16GB. I have a laptop with 3GB: one of the slots only supports 1GB.
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.
I had never heard of it, but checking it, I see MGLRU is enabled by default on my kernel (Mageia 10 with 6.18.xx). Are there distros where this is not enabled? Especially the ones mentioned in the blogpost? In that case it would need a recompile of the kernel, right? Or send in a bugreport to the distro.
For HDD, it also needs to be tuned. In its default configuration, MGLRU 'just' manages multiple generations of working sets, but there's a min_ttl_ms tunable which tries hard to prevent file cache from being reclaimed, which is not enabled by default.
https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/multigen_lru.html#thr...
You'd want to set it to 300 or 500, or even 1000 for the HDDs. Around 100-200 for SSDs/EMMCs helps as well.
And for anonymous pages swapping, you'd want to do that on zram (compressed swap in RAM). It also make wonders. You don't want to touch the (old) disk for that.
Here's my old article (before MGLRU): https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/linux-for-old-pc-from-2007/en/
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.
I have one Nvdia system where it's locked to their drivers in BIOS meaning I can't use AMD. Now Ubuntu has dropped support for old GeForce it's essentially a brick, thanks Nvidia and Canonical.
Nouveau might handle it.
Gallium will support r300 Radeon cards perfectly fine. If any I have this for some MESA and Intel video cards at ~/.drirc.
Adapt it for your radeon driver. The device driver might be "ati", "radeon" or "radeonsi".
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.
See my comment above.
Its a pathetic world.. and sad.. I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB.. If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling, I really get shivers... WTF?! How is that even possible? Bloat is astronomical and yet.. Most people just does NOT care...
> I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB..
In what context?
>If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling
Modern Gnome and KDE distros with batteries included also idea at around 2GB RAM which is a useless metric anyway as Windows 11 also preloads frequently used takes and apps on boot.
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.
>€90 all in for an incredible Linux machine that still runs games great at 1080p.
That's 90 for just the upgrade, not the whole PC, and that Rx480 won't run recent AAA games on 1080p, maybe just older games.
What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler.
Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?
The older Intel-based Dell XPS 13 machines have the same footprint as some 11 inch Chromebooks. Some models have thermal quirks that cause a shutdown, which is easily addressed by lowering the CPU frequency. Battery life is pretty good (but I replaced the batteries before I realized the CPU issue was the culprit).
old thinkpad X series is a good place to look
You’ll need to look at chromebook that can have a linux distro on it. I like the a good keyboard width so 14 inch laptop are my sweet spot. I have a latitude 7490 (which I wouldn’t recommend as it have an hardware design flaw ( it freeze when held one handed)) and it’s light.
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.
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.
And you can go even smaller with TinyCore Linux [0] or the xwoaf-rebuild [1]
0, http://www.tinycorelinux.net/
1, https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
Honestly it comes down to what do you mean by using Linux. In 2026, or well at least since the mid 2010s, the biggest hurdle will be the web browser. Do you need that? If yes then you are already in the higher system requirement pool. If not then pretty much anything goes, like the options I mentioned above. And even then you can use curl, wget, aria2 etc to access online content to some extent
> And you can go even smaller with TinyCore Linux or the xwoaf-rebuil
Sure, but in this time and age, do they really have to settle for such extreme 90s looks as defaults? I mean, Windows XP Media Center Edition can surely be considered as "lightweight" today and it featured the gorgeous Royale theme back in 2005.
Yeah, this is what always surprises me with modern software targeted towards low-specced computers.
Windows XP run fine in 256MB ram computers yet it could be altered to make it look fantastic, with the Royale or Royale Noir themes.
I guess even Linux back then could be made beautiful on similarly specced computers. Yet, AntiX or even LxQt is hideous despite consuming more resources!
I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of customization. I think partially it's down to the platform many use (many seek to theme mobile OSes), but the tools to do so has to be a large contribution. I'm not aware of anything like Stardock's Skin studio that exists outside windows, and from looking at their website it's now useless for anything past win10 1909. Having their art seen on widely used platforms (OS or applications) has to be a large draw to it as well.
Otter Browser it's uber light, but for proper support you might need to build it against the qtwebkit/qtwebengine plugin (I can't remember, but one of the two engines was the most modern one). If not, I have Dillo+MPV+ytdlp/streamlink for video sites. More than often if you works. Also, I have gemini://gemi.dev (Dillo plugin) for the news sites tunneled over Gemini and some nice Gopher sites such gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org
It's interesting how on a server 2 GiB of RAM can get you quite far, however on a desktop that's pretty much the minimum feasible amount. It used to be the opposite: servers needed plenty of RAM and CPU compared to desktops
Personal servers never needed much in the way of resources. They only did, and still do, when you have a lot of simultaneous users. The database servers at Google or Microsoft don't have 2GiB of RAM. They plausibly have 2TiB.
My free tier 1GB GCP instance is doing quite wel as a reverse proxy into my private network. Although traffic is very low.
Swap the HDD for an SSD first makes more difference than the distro choice.
This!
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:
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.Alpine Linux Combined with OXWM isn't a bad idea. If your install is small and you have enough ram it's possible to run it from RAM with persistence.
Please consider if you really need zram when zswap is an alternative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500746
I would advise against using Lubuntu in favour of MX Linux or AntiX for older systems.
For "older but not truly retro" devices, I personally recommend linux mint. I have a fx6100 running it.
Don't get your OS recommendations from an LLM-generated article.
If you think Linux is a good candidate for older hardware (which it is) wait until you try a BSD.
>The honest assessment: If the machine cannot run a lightweight Linux desktop at a usable speed after you have applied the optimizations in this guide, it is time to recycle it responsibly. Most municipalities have e-waste collection programs. Do not throw it in the trash. The components contain recyclable metals and toxic materials that need proper handling.
This is the whole point.Linux helps in that judgement whether to keep or throw the box.
Agree with you.
Linux itself is a good OS, even better when you have an old machine to "revive". But when even Linux can't run properly, time ditch it...
If you can't run linux you can always run netbsd. or any *bsd.
Besides the advice on ditching hardware on account of thermal problems is .. terrible. If you went so far as installing obscure linux distros, surely unscrewing a few screws and applying a vacuum and then some thermal paste isn't out of reach.
Or sell it to the retrocomputing community for a decent amount of $$$.
OS/2 might also be an option on some of this older hardware.
It might, but (honest question) why would I want OS/2 over Linux?