I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.

Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?

34 points

You need something like DamnSmallLinux, not Debian. Debian users about 800 MB of RAM with XFce, on a clean boot. It requires a minimum of 2 GB with a modern browser (one tab, 4+ GB with more tabs). DamnSmallLinux uses about 128 MB RAM on a clean boot, and with the Netfront browser about half a gig. Definitely better for such a laptop than any modern distro.

permalink
report
reply
7 points
*

Antix linux would also work great, and DSL is based on it.

permalink
report
parent
reply
24 points
*

Maybe try Openbox instead of XFCE. Can’t promise it’ll add much memory but with 1gb RAM I guess every bit counts?

Edit: just had a quick look around, and it looks like your machine can be upgraded to a whopping 2gb RAM… It’s still not great, but it is a 100% increase in memory.

Edit 2: I’m not actually recommending you buy RAM from memorystock.com, it just turned up at the top of my search results. The page should give you the type and version you’ll need to look for, though.

permalink
report
reply
7 points

2 gb memory should make XFCE usable. That’s what my crappy laptop has and XFCE works fine. I use Firefox with a few open tabs and watch YouTube at 720p.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I once swapped a Debian install with XFCE to just running Openbox instead of a full DE and got down to 300Mb or so of memory usage. This was about a decade ago so obviously YMMV but given literally all I did was run Debian with just openbox and no DE, there’s probably additional tuning to be done that can get them to a more usable state

permalink
report
parent
reply
15 points

SSD upgrade

permalink
report
reply
10 points

And then ZRAM and swap like hell

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

I thought it’s either swap or ZRAM - could you use both at the same time?

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

Yes Fedora uses swap and zram by default. Just compresses the memory in RAM (more memory available) and on disk (less data written, less wear)

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Won’t that kill the SSD on short notice? Or can they make do with it for years?

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

I mean, worth the tradeoff? Zram would just make the cpu work more. Swap… kill the ssd

But over time. SSDs can handle a lot, like a couple of years?

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

This will be the single biggest change you can make. Swapping an hdd for a cheap 256gb ssd will make a bigger difference than any DE changes.

permalink
report
parent
reply
14 points

If you use mechanical hard drive in it, it worth a try to replace it with an SSD. After that, Debian should run much better.

permalink
report
reply
4 points

Hopefully it got standard SATA connector.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

You can buy IDE m.2 converter. There are usb to floppy converters, usb drive shows up as floppy drive. You can attach modern peripherals to old computers, this kind of retro world with modern and old parts mixed is funny.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Would it worth, though? I mean, is there a significant difference on IDE between HDD or SSD? With an adapter, SATA speeds on the long run would be bottlenecked by IDE if I’m correct.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

without any checking of course, I assumed that machine is “new enough” to have some form of SATA in it, but good point

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Yeah the machine is 32-bit, so it’s a question worth asking.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Time flies, where a HDD is barely enough to run a minimal Linux.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

I acquired an ewaste laptop with an 8 year old celeron, 4GB of memory and a 500GB HDD. I tossed Linux Mint on there as an experiment to see what would work decently on there. Its not great, but its usable and might become my daughter’s first computer. Running firefox its noticably slow but I can crack open Libre Office or ScummVM and other than the initial load time it’s pretty snappy. I kinda forgot how hard drives give systems that slow-then-fast feeling…

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points
*

JWM is my suggestion. It’s a floating window manager (not tiling) that doesn’t require almost any knowledge or key bindings to use and it has all necessary stuff included out of the box afaik. You can also use xdgmenumaker to make the right click/Start menu better.

permalink
report
reply

Linux

!linux@lemmy.ml

Create post

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

  • Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
  • No misinformation
  • No NSFW content
  • No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

Community stats

  • 6.6K

    Monthly active users

  • 6.6K

    Posts

  • 179K

    Comments