Easy Distro for websurfing with old laptop. Possible?

[gipsyshadow]

I've got an old acer tm notebook with 1.6 ghz centrino cpu and 1.25gb ram (I guess DDR1 270mhz but I can be wrong). I still use it sometimes just as an "emergency" machine, eg. as an addition backup space for my storage, if I want to write something with old office within win xp environment and to run other old sw, but I can't use it to surf the web because I cannot install any AV else win xp would freeze.

I've been using only this machine from its "creation" until about 1 year ago and I solved the websurfing problem using PaleMoon browser and some plugin like adblock to avoid loading the "heavy" content of today web pages. It was a situation full of limitations because I couldn't open more than 2-3 pages at the same time -and dangerous too due to no AV and the obsolete OS- but it was good enough for me.
Now I'd like to use sometimes this old acer to surf the web, so I'm thinking to get a linux OS to avoid AV and a web browser with right plugins able to load only the fundamental content of the web pages, I mean avoiding to load flash content and everything the would freeze the 1.25gb ram.

My level of knowledge of linux is "dummy" because I've only been using ubuntu 18.04 from 1 year so I'm used to work almost with GUI and not with the terminal. That is fundamental because I couldn't use distro as archlinux based more on terminal then GUI and for his reason i specified "easy"

[uRock]

If it is 32bit, then I'd recommend Debian Buster with the LXDE desktop. It only uses about 200MB of RAM at idle on my old Asus Netbook.

[gipsyshadow]

Hi uRock, nice avatar
Yes, it's an old 32bit. Thanks for your suggestion, I'd just wanna ask a comparison between ubuntu + lxde (lubuntu) and debian + lxde as you suggested, because 4-5 years ago I had been running lubuntu for a while on that machine and it had been quite good.

By the way, will I be able to surf the web with debian+lxde "basically" (in the sense I wrote above)?

[crip720]

Have an old Toshiba with a P4 cpu and about the same ram. Use Lubuntu 16.04 on it and it can keep up, if you don't overload it with tabs open, a few are okay. Chrome does not have a 32 bit version anymore, but think all the rest still do, have to check that. Would check if your model can accept more ram, if it can you can probably find some cheap. ebay should have it.

[uRock]

Hi uRock, nice avatar
Yes, it's an old 32bit. Thanks for your suggestion, I'd just wanna ask a comparison between ubuntu + lxde (lubuntu) and debian + lxde as you suggested, because 4-5 years ago I had been running lubuntu for a while on that machine and it had been quite good.

By the way, will I be able to surf the web with debian+lxde "basically" (in the sense I wrote above)?

Firefox can be a bit slow on it, but it should be fine as long as you don't try Facebook or any other resource intensive sites.

Lubuntu and Debian's LXDE are very similar. I used the Debian non-free image so it'd have non-free driver support. I mostly use it as a Motion server.

The foreseeable problem with Lubuntu is the dropping of 32bit support. Canonical decided it's time to move on and invest developer time elsewhere.

16.04 only offers support for Ubuntu. The other DEs only get 3 years of support on LTSes.

[gipsyshadow]

Upgrading acer's ram from 1.25gb to 2gb is possible but 1) I'd like to avoid spending money on this old laptop though it'd cost about 10-15$ and 2) I'd dismantle it and that would take about 2h, so I could consider this upgrading if and only if that got this situation very much better, I mean the goal of this thread.

Let me understand "the dropping of 32bit support" better. If now I get lubuntu 18.04 (or 16.04) will it support 32b cpu only for few time more? If now I get debian lxde will it keep supporting 32b for long time? Is this the difference?
By the way, where can I read the system requirements of debian lxde? I've only found lubuntu's ones on wikipedia: Pentium M cpu (ok, mine is "banias"), RAM 1 GB (ok, mine is 1.25gb), 15 GB space (mhhhh... I guess 10gb can handle a "basic" lubuntu installation), video 1024×768 (ok).

A friend of mime has talked me about "puppy" linux. How can it be compared to lxde DEs about ram usage and usability (for a dummy linux user as me)?

[uRock]

18.04 is the last 32bit Lubuntu release, which has support until 2021. The packages that are shared with ubuntu, such as kernels, will get support until 2023. I went with Debian because I don't ever want to upgrade it again, but if I do, then it will be supported. The release will likely outlive the netbook.

I haven't tried Puppy for several years, so I can't say much about it.

[crip720]

Puppy and other tiny linuxs are made to run on systems with even less specs than yours, think they can work with around 150 Mbs of ram. Be a bit different OS than what ubuntu/lubuntu shows you. Googling for small linux should give you their sites. Remember that minimum specs is what an OS will work on, not that they will work well on.

[jetsam]

Absolutely give a live Puppy Linux a try. I haven't run it in several years, but it was so easy to get running, it was a great test distro just to check the Linux compatibility of hardware like yours. It can "install" itself by saving a big file to any hard drive partition you want; any file system, too. That makes a few gigs of persistent storage, which is all the Puppy needs to sing. It's easier to install Puppy than to not install Puppy.

Edited to add: Puppy uses a different memory paradigm than most distros... it's more efficient with ram than almost all of them. I can't recall the details, but the net effect is that all your applications reside permanently in fast access ram, so starting programs is nearly instantaneous. Puppy came out before SSDs were common, and it was a revelation that every single application on a computer could essentially have an instant start time. It seemed really revolutionary when it first appeared.

[gipsyshadow]

Googling for small linux should give you their sites

I know but I hope to get your direct experience with linux distros here Anyway I've been googling for a while and got other 2 interesting distros: antix and mx linux.
If I'm not wrong these 3 distros are systemd-free (opposite to ubuntu) and I'd like to know if this can help or not about ram usage for my personal case, considered that my goal is to get a distro with min ram usage because I'd like to surf the web. If I'm not wrong that's the ascending order of these 3 distros by ram usage: puppy, antix, mx, isn't that?
What about the 32b support of antix and mx?
If I'm not wrong both puppy and mx are good for noobs (as me), what about antix?