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He’s a big box store professional; in other words constantly confidently incorrect.

Linux can run off an HDD.

Hell, there are versions of Linux that are designed to be run off a USB stick.

If you want to run a modern current linux distro on a laptop with only 2gb of ram and 500gb then your options are very limited, but it is possible.

For example. Void Linux with Enlightenment will work. A browser will work ok for basic websites but heavy apps like Gmail will be unusably slow.

If you have no option to upgrade, you can still use a machine with those specs to run linux apps like Abiword, Gnumeric, GIMP, etc very well.

Also, putting in any SSD drive to replace the spinning one is the single best upgrade you can make in terms of performance and longevity on an old laptop.

I my Raspberry PI got Linux running on an SD card. Thats not SSD either, is it?

No.

Linux can easily be run on your 500 MB HDD, it can also be run from an USB stick or even a DVD.

Linux can even run on the original Raspberry Pi, a single board computer with only 512 MB RAM!

You should probably look for a distro that is made for older systems, but if you do that, it should work very well. There are obviously limitations with only 2GB RAM. So I wouldn’t use a resource heavy desktop like KDE/Plasma.

No

In system requirements, windows vs any normal linux distro isn’t even contest. That said, 2 gb is very little. You’re gonna have to find a lightweight distro meant for old hardware.

Linux runs on toasters and light bulbs, literally. You can run it on whatever, depending on your use-case.

There are versions of Linux that don’t need any internal storage at all, eg. Puppy.

I’d recommend tinycore for this computer since it’s ram is so limited

This depends a lot more on what you plan on doing once the OS boots. I accidentally loaded Win11 on an HDD (disk 0 was HDD, not SSD) for a few hours. It was noticeably slow, but it ran my diagnostics utilities well enough.

If you’re using it for light web browsing, basic office software, etc, then it might be fine.

But something else caught my attention - you inquired about “restoring” it at shops, meaning you intend to pay money. SSD and RAM are obviously what anyone would upgrade, and you’re balking at it. More to the point, you expect to run Linux, but didn’t even install it as-is to test it out?

There’s some missing context here. Also, 2gb laptops haven’t been a thing in a very long time. You might very well get a better deal by just buying a used newer model that already has what you’re looking for.

Linux can run on a fucking potato.

It can even run diskless just over the network. Like Ubuntu diskless booting.