In some way it is similar for an old laptop I bought to my sister, an Acer Aspire One:
Intel Atom
1GB of RAM and upgraded to 2GB (DDR2)
I Installed Linux Peppermint based on Debian for 32 bits. It works fine.
So If you have experience with either Ubuntu or Debian, it is quickly friendly to gain experience with that OS.
My advice:
If is possible upgrade the hardware, according with the budget, do it and use Peppermint. It is lightweight and comfortable
It is my 2 cents.
p.d: Normally I use any laptop until it “passes away” … so far I didn’t have that sadly scenario
according to the description this one even has 4 GB of RAM.
So I guess that shouldn´t be the problem.
I´m not so sure as far as SSD is concerned.
I believe there was a time when SSDs were supposed to be treated differently from HDDs. As I´ve never used an SSD I didn´t pay much attention at the time.
Perhaps this isn´t relevant any longer. I just wanted to make sure… .
4GB would be nothing or much according the case. If the final customer uses the laptop only for Web purposes, would be enough. For developing is other history. For example because my laptop is very old and based on 32 bits was installed Geany editor and works fine.
About Office (Excel, Word etc) would be an issue perhaps for your “client”
Take in consideration the following:
RAM is used to let the programs running fast
HD used to store data and impacts time of the OS startup by itself (I am assuming RAM is involved too)
But for the 2nd point - I have a Toshiba Satellite was upgraded from 4GB to 16GB about RAM and works very fine for developing purposes, the difference was very notable. BTW it has Ubuntu. About the HD, it was changed due timelife/failure of the disk itself, well it was changed and upgrades from HDD 750GB to SSD 1TB, the startup is impressive from 1.5 minutes to 14 seconds. So there is a clear difference between HDD and SSD. Of course you can feel the OS working faster. Remember the holy trinity
I don’t think this is as concerning as it once was. There is a limited number of write cycles for SSD drives. My thought was that using a swap partition would send a lot of writes to the same area of disk. Ubuntu these days, and probably other distros, you can use a swap file rather than a swap partition. That way the writes are spread over different areas of the disk rather than the same area until it fails. The controller on the SSD itself should perform wear leveling to mitigate this issue anyway, but I share your concern.
The 4 GB RAM sounds good enough for most any distro and desktop environment. I doubt she is going to do CAD or software development, right? Mostly web browsing and email.
The Celeron processor doesn’t sound great, but at least there are 4 cores.
The other positive is the components sound like they are Intel from what we can see. Graphics, CPU, and Wi-Fi are all Intel. Driver support is pretty good across distros for Intel.
My biggest sons laptop is an Acer Aspire A314 with a very similar (weak) configuration.
Now I’m not sure of its CPU, but it’s a celeron N-something too.
We got it with a slow HDD which I replaced with a 2,5" 256GB SSD.
The 4GB RAM is well enough for his scientific purposes.
Debian 11 with MATE runs quite acceptable.
With Celeron N CPUs, with some distros you’ll need some tweak with kernel parameters, or it will hang randomly - I remember this happened first with 5.x kernels, 4.1?.x before wasn’t affected.
This is some bug around Celerons power management features. I could pick the right startup parameters, with which it worsk reliable, but now I cant remember.
I’ll look this up for you, whenever I get that laptop in my hands again (probably on the weekend).
Generally, I don’t think you need a special distro for a laptop. Just choose a distro to your liking (if you are going to administer that computer, choose the distro you know the best - the less it will surprise you in any way), but choose a DE for it, which is light enough for a weak hardware, or the polar opposite, fully-full flegded according to an atom-ant-monster-beast-hardware.
I hope, you get the idea
Edit:
I looked up info link you provided. From that:
Windows 11 Home (S Modus)
Whoaaa, with Win 10 there was a trick to get it out of “S” mode, but it was a nightmare… basically impossible to install anything from outside MS-store. I don’t know how win11 behaves in this regard, but I suspect it made harder to get out of S… (I may be wrong).
Anyway, I’m confident, a preinstalled Windows in “S” mode right deserves immediate nuking
Khmmm…
I don’t find this a very good idea.
With that you will find that Linux handles the VM, but this has almost zero info about how it’s going on bare metal.
If there’s a doubt, better try Linux in a live session booting from USB before nuking Win.
Running Linux in a VM under Windows host on a weak hardware, that will show Linux to be sloooooooow as well.
I agree with this suggestion. The PC specs are fine for for just about any Distro I believe. Especially, if the person is going to just surf the web and do emails. Having a SSD is nice. You will notice the fast install / boot time. I have installed Linux on laptops with a SSD with no problems.
I have an ssd only desktop, but Linux on it hardly ever swaps, because it is 8Gb ram, so I am not concerned about the swap partition wearing.
I probably should change it to a swap file.
How often do you think linux with 4Gb ram would swap?
It would depend on the programs used of course. If she just used a web browser and email there shouldn’t be much if any swap. I like to use htop to see the usage. It clearly shows memory and swap usage.
This is a reply but with a very basic question from someone currently trying to learn Linux with the hope after some dual booting of eventually replacing Windows.
Question. Is it not possible if a full version of a chosen distros is downloaded ie the ISO file to a big enough USB stick to run the distro each time from the USB itself without actually loading it on to the pc ?
Realise probably a very stupid question but very Green and like to know the answer especially,if not possible why not.
Thank you
A friend of mine bought a laptop at MIcroCenter that was on sale. It came with Windows 11 Home pre-installed. He had me wipe Windows and install Linux. I installed OpenSuse Tumbleweed AND it could not detect the wifi, camera, or microphone. Luckily he had a usb camera with mic and a USB wifi adapter. There have been several kernel updates and the camera started working and the mic was detected but will not work. I told him give Linux time to get the new devices running properly.
It is possible if the .iso file contsins a ‘live’ distro
Some .iso files contsin only material for an install, otgers contsin a full distro which will boot and run
but
You can not write files when running a live usb… at least with most you cant, there are some sophisticated procedures which allow what they call ‘persistance’ , but mak ing a usb with persistance is quite difficult.
So stay with your original plan… get a usb to boot, do an install to HD, and setup a multiboot with windows.
That´s good to know.
I believe I read something about TRIM and how to treat SSDs differently. But that was long time ago.
Things surely have evolved since then, like you also suggested.
O.K., I would´ve done it this way anyhow.
Thanks for the explanation. Good to to know the background facts.
You´re perfectly right. That´s the way it´s going to be.
If she ever uses web browsing and e-mail on her own, that would be progress indeed.
For me it´s mainly when running virtual machines.
Of course swapping can start at an earlier point.
Like @pdecker said, it depends on the programmes in use at any time.
Our intention is to get rid of WIN for good. So it should be erased during the installation process of Linux.
Accordingly it cannot be in S mode as there´s no WIN left.
So hopefully there shouldn´t be any problems as far as installation is concerned… .
No, not at all. There are no stupid questions and we all keep learning all the time.
@nevj ´s answer is perfect.
So basically: yes.
Like Neville said: you´d need persistence to do anything useful with it that way. Otherwise any changes you applied to the system would be lost after a reboot.
Or: you could install a Linux distro on a USB-stick.
S mode is a security feature for that MS is installing, it is only available for W11 Home. If you nuke W11 in S mode, I am not sure on how the bios will play with Linux. It is not difficult to take the laptop out of S mode, have already helped several family members with this, but once out of S mode, their is no going back.
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