I bought an old HP chromebook cheap on ebay that came with Zorin OS installed. It isn’t much, but just about manages to do what I need. The trouble is, Zorin seems kind of bloated and the Chromebook hasn’t got much memory. I don’t even have enough space to install updates.

I’m comfortable with running a pared-down OS that might be a better fit for a tired old Chromebook. What might work better than Zorin?

  • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    I am going to try something else completely. I dont know if it will work.

    The Plan: A thin client that connects to an always on RDP session either on a real computer or my servers virtual one.

    Alpine Linux in Diskless mode, Xorg, Freedrp

    No desktop environment, no window manager. Everything loads into ram.

    A project for the weekend, curious how it will go.

    Issues that need to be addressed:

    suspend when lid closed will have to be added manually. RDP probably should drop or ask for a password at each wake up if the laptop leaves the house. When remote I guess tailscale or similar will have to be implemented.

  • HackyMrHippie@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    I have 3 old Chromebooks (2gb/4gb ram and 16gb/32gb storage) and I run MX with XFCE which runs like a dream. Previously I used Arch with KDE which also ran smoothly enough which surprised me. One thing worth doing with whichever distro/DE you choose, remove all the software you won’t use and it makes a huge difference!

  • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    3 months ago

    For 16 GB SSD with 4 GBs of RAM (which is what most Chromebooks used to be), you will need Debian with XFce, with 2 GB of swap partition. Nothing else will either fit, or work properly. I have given away 3 such laptops to friends with that setup (Arch might fit ok too, but because I was giving it to friends, Debian was easier to work with). After installing the v12 Bookworm Debian OS, with libreoffice, a couple of simple games (e.g. solitaire), Gimp, and that 2 gb swap partition, I was left with 5 GB free space. I had to occasionally do sudo apt autoremove to make sure the space wasn’t eaten away, but overall, it stayed steady (dh -h will give you that info). With Trixie, you might end up with 4 GBs of free space, as it’s bigger. Bookworm has updates until 2029.

      • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        You will have to reinstall the OS, and redo the partition table (256 MB boot partition (that’s enough for a single OS), 2 GB swap, and the rest / root partition). Then install Debian with XFce on the / partition. You use it normally as with any other Debian-based OS, that Zorin is also one of them, but you use the terminal to update the system. It’s very usable.

  • dfgxx@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Try chimera Linux, it is very lightweight (but also depends on the desktop environment)

  • inanimate_carbon_rod@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    I’ve been distro-hopping on a 2018 cheapo Chromebook for about a year. So far, I’ve tried Debian (Bookworm) with XFCE, AntiX, PeppermintOS, and now ARCH with Sway. None of the first three were particularly snappy, but they were all running full desktop environments. With Arch/Sway, I’m running about as light as I can get: no login manager, only 441 packages installed. Web browser is Helium. It’s early yet, but I think it does feel a little faster–most of the time. Helium still takes a few seconds to load, for example.

    Running bare Arch is a bit extreme, but I think the real difference probably comes down to using a WM instead of a full DE. Sway is pretty light, and from what I could find, Wayland is supposed to be a little lighter/quicker than X11, but if toy want to go that way, you could use i3. Configuration from scratch can be a bit intimidating, but I looked online for shared dotfiles I liked and customized from there.

    Good luck! Hope it goes all and is a fun experiment!

    My specs: Astronaut (rev 3) Chromebook. Intel Celeron N3350 dual core @ 2.4 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 500 integrated graphics, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC storage.

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
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    3 months ago

    I used to use Arch + KDE on a device with only 32 gb of storage space. I used BTRFS and transparent compression, and I got the actual Arch Linux install compressed down into 6 gb (where it would have been 10 gb uncompressed).

  • ISolox@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I would go with debian with a light weight desktop. If you have issues after that maybe puppy Linux?

  • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Mine is painful for storage. The eMMC is the most painful part. I can deal with low memory, I can deal with the cpu, but read and writes are painfully slow.

    I am using fedora cosmic atomic and it works better than most.

    Look up how to tweak reads and writes for eMMC if you have it, you can help speed it up.