this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Absolutely correct, Alpine can run a desktop environment with 500 megs.