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Hello, I got almost for free a Lenovo laptop: CPU Intel i3 8130, 4Gb RAM. I would like to use It to learn Linux. I saw some people using Arch to learn the inside out of Linux, but I'm afraid It could be to challenging. What do you suggest? What Is the best way to learn? Thank you. Edit: First of all I thank you all for your suggestions, I think that this is what makes this community special. I installed Fedora Xfce for now and I worked all evening to male it work and customize it. I'm learning a lot already. I'll move to Arch as soon I'll feel comfortable with Fedora. Thank you all again.
I saw some people using Arch to learn the inside out of Linux, but I’m afraid It could be to challenging.
It will be challenging but IMO give it a shot if you think it is something you might want to do. No harm in trying really. If you mess it up or find it too hard or whatever you can always install something else afterwards. It is not like you are stuck with your first choice forever. The only thing you will lose is a bit of time and will gain a better understanding of things even if you cannot make it fully work.
I don't agree that arch is not a beginner distro - it is a DIY distro that requires a lot of reading and willingness to learn and understand things. The arch wiki is an excellent resource for anyone (on any distro IMO) and well worth reading. If you are OK with that work then it makes a fine distro for anyone, beginner or not. It is not a distro for many people - again does not matter if they are a beginner or not. It is for people with a particular mindset. One that you might change over time or as you grow and learn more overall.
No harm either if you decide it is not for you. Play around with a few distros and try to find which one works best for you. There is really no one best distro. Just a lot of different things that appeal to different people and the only real way to find out which you like is to try them out.
I'd second this, but also add that you probably want to use something like XFCE for your desktop environment due to the amount of RAM you have: fedoraproject.org/spins
Why wouldn't an atomic distro not be for beginners?
There's no reason why a beginner wouldn't be able to use one. Maybe i's overwhelming for a power user that doesn't know linux well but for a beginner who doesn't use too much functionality it's perfect. You just use flatpak which you should also do on non atomic distros.
I suggest Linux Mint. It has GUIs for almost everything and it's very stable. With a little bit of tinkering of the services at startup, you can get Mint to run at 700 MB of RAM (as read via htop), instead of its default ~1 GB of RAM. That could be important to fit it better at 4 GB of ram with some demanding browsing.
I disagree with anyone who might suggest Fedora or Ubuntu with 4 GB of RAM. These distros require about 2+ GB of RAM to boot up, double than that of Mint.
Then there are the distros meant for older machines that use less ram, but it's a shame to use these when your laptop is fast-enough with an 8th gen cpu (comparatively to very old machines, that is).
The lowest ram usage I've seen with a full-fledge distro/DE, is XFce with endeavourOS. I load it at 490 MB of RAM (it takes 630 MB on Mint for the same layout/apps).
Basically, your challenge is the RAM, not the CPU or the drive. Use an appropriate distro for the RAM and the difficulty you want, and always be mindful to not have too many tabs/apps open at the same time.
I commented elsewhere about endeavourOS, but I have some other wisdom to pass along.
Keep good backups of your personal files, stuff you don’t want to lose, and don’t be afraid to try something new. You dont like something about how your system is running? Nuke it and install something else. Installing Linux is a cakewalk in most distros and rarely takes longer than half an hour (your mileage may vary with the low specs on the laptop)
I’ve learned a ton about Linux by trying many different distros, breaking things, fixing things, and occasionally distro hopping to see how I like a different offering.
There’s a lot of great content on YouTube that can help you learn, and reviews of various distros so you can get an idea of how things work without having to install it yourself. Have fun and don’t be afraid to fiddle with things.
Did you know “separation of church & state” outrage only ever targets Christianity? Public schools let Muslim kids pray to Mecca during class time, but silent Christian prayer gets lawsuits. It’s not about neutrality—it’s selective hostility masked as secularism.
Muslims and the majority of other "religions" don't have a "church". They may have places of worship, but the term "separation of church and state" is exactly that. It's not "separation of worship and state"
@TruckDriver Well I think that's exactly my point of view which is to say the current if you will atheist secular view is that all religion is behind the firewall of church and state separation and so it means that all prayer and prayfulness and worship and faith is also firewalled outside of public school. When really the law is about the separation of the church which is its own government body and the American state which is secular by nature. Church of England and Roman Catholicism FYI.
I think I was attempting to make more of a legal language POV. Today is all about language and definition rather than loose interpretation of terms... unless it can be manipulated. So when you see the term "church", most will associate it with Christianity only. So with literal definition, Muslim and other forms of worship wouldn't be included in "church"
@TruckDriver My interpretation of everything is always so loose that I've been called The village hole and the village bicycle yo yo yo hubba hubba hubba
The entire concept has be intentionally reinterpreted. The words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the Constitution. They come from a letter that Jefferson wrote to a member of the clergy at the time. The clergyman was concerned that the first amendment would limit religious people's participation in government.
Jefferson assured him that the intent behind it was to keep the state out of church affairs, not the other way around. The state would be neutral (no establishment of a state religion) and would not prohibit religious practices. That was it. It didn't say that people can't bring their religious ideas into government or that state money and facilities couldn't be used by religious institutions or even practices. During his presidency, church services were held in the Capitol building. When asked about it, he said it was consistent with Constitution because no one was required to attend, therefore no state religion was being established and free practice was preserved.
So when the original intent has been distorted so much, why should it be surprising that it's not being enforced equally? We know the intent of the amendment as the author wrote it down and we can read it today. Even using the phrase "separation of church and state" in a legal proceeding makes no sense...it's not actually in the law which should be the basis of the issue before a court.
@midway This is really interesting thank you I really appreciate the insight there is loads of stuff in here I didn't know I always do say and this reinforces it so I must have learned it somewhere that it is more about separation of church and state to protect the church from the state and it looks like you kind of supported that and I really appreciate that kind of willingness to explain educated analyze. Mahalo mahalo mahalo
“We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”
"We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a government…
Wilson is a hypocrite because he condemned elite control of government, yet created Federal Reserve, introduced the income tax, backed League of Nations, & enforced Espionage & Sedition Acts—all of which concentrated power in hands of unelected elites & crushed dissent; either he was a fool who was duped, or a self-righteous idealist who thought he knew best & was disastrously wrong.
Wilson came directly from the world of academia—only U.S. president to hold a Ph.D.!
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says uranium enrichment is the key to Iran’s nuclear issue, dismissing US proposals for Tehran to ultimately stop all enrichment in the country.
Follow Steve Hsu on X(Twitter) here: https://x.com/hsu_steveToday we sit with the U.S. Physicist and Computing scientist Steve Hsu to talk about the US China...
I am looking for a distro with a customisable UI. I want the ability to change everything in the UI: like changing the window borders style, animated interface, creating transition animations. Something that can allow me to create UI from my favourite video games. I am even willing to learn a language if needed. Just don't suggest arch because I'm only interested in visuals. I don't want to spend time creating and troubleshooting other aspects of os. Also, if above requirements can be achieved with changing the desktop environment, please suggest that too. I am somewhat familiar with Linux as I used it a few years ago for some time. Back then, the games' support was lacking, so I switched back. But now with steam os and proton's contribution, games shouldn't be a hassle to run.
If you want to get into customizing UIs hard, something the likes of this
You could get started with window managers (very opiniated topic, its really up to you to decide on which you should use) and UI toolkits like - ewww - AGS - QuickShell
Also I know X11 is slowly dying but AwesomeWM fits your bill really nicely.
TL,DR: You want a cool UI? look at unixporn's top posts of all time, research an option you find good enough and go bananas on everything you need to make yourself at home.
ALSO consider posting at !unixporn@lemmy.ml so we can marvel at your fine grained setup, good luck!
"He who wishes for anything but Christ, does not know what he wishes; he who asks for anything but Christ, does not know what he is asking; he who works, and not for Christ, does not know what he is doing."
Context: I tried to use the Piefed migration feature to migrate !barcelona@lemm.ee to !barcelona@piefed.social
piefed.social/c/barcelona now exists, with all the existing posts there, as well as the icon and description.
It even moved some subscribers (there are around 100 now), from what I understand those were Piefed subscribers that got automatically moved.
The one caveat is that from Lemmy instances, the community doesn't have show old posts (see lemm.ee/c/barcelona@piefed.soc…), but if you were restarting a community from scratch you wouldn't have access to your old posts anyway.
This ensure that at least the posts are transferred to a community on an active instance, which is probably the main concern for lemm.ee communities at the moment.
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to discourage people from moving to or using piefed. I understand the enthusiasm for it and utility of it. This is meant to foster discussion not hate on piefed.
Is it just me or are a lot of people just ignoring the fact that a lot of communities and people are centralizing to pretty much a single point of failure again? Wouldn't it be wise to expand the number of piefed instances to help keep things spread out there too if that's the platform you prefer?
You have to scroll 3 times to see !television@lemm.ee, the first Lemm.ee community.
Lemm.ee was already a decentralization factor from LW, but it was still tiny in terms of communities compared to LW. Moving all of the Lemm.ee communities to Piefed.social (not that it's the case anyway, I've seen communities moving elsewhere) would keep the status quo that we were all living with.
Of course ideally over time more Piefed instances emerge, and we can spread a bit more. Also, thanks to the Piefed migration feature, we'll be able to move communities much smoother (even including subscribers).
You have to scroll 3 times to see !television@lemm.ee, the first Lemm.ee community.
Lemm.ee was already a decentralization factor from LW, but it was still tiny in terms of communities compared to LW. Moving all of the Lemm.ee communities to Piefed.social (not that it's the case anyway, I've seen communities moving elsewhere) would keep the status quo that we were all living with.
Of course ideally over time more Piefed instances emerge, and we can spread a bit more. Also, thanks to the Piefed migration feature, we'll be able to move communities much smoother (even including subscribers).
Right, I've seen pretty much that same reply already.
I think it's a chance to learn a lesson from how and why lemm.ee is shutting down. Right now I think people are risking moving the same problem somewhere else. Sure, in theory the problem gets better with time because the tools to move around are there, but that only matters if there's somewhere to move.
It would be much more encouraging to see dozens of new piefed instances being launched/advertised. I think there's a big push towards something new because it's in the right place at the right time, and I genuinely hope it's a successful project long term. I just hope the people utilizing it are willing to support it as a platform and not just as a flagship instance.
Im Februar veröffentlichte die Universität Hildesheim einen Bericht über den Sexualwissenschaftler Helmut Kentler. Jetzt melden sich immer mehr Opfer des pädosexuellen Netzwerks zu Wort.
La flottille pour Gaza est en danger ! Soutenez RimaHas@x.com et toustes les militantEs à bord ! Interpellez massivement ! Instructions à suivre dans le post de Rima ⬇️
Q vanished like a fart in a hurricane. Was it a LARP? A Langley fever dream? An FBI sting op? Or did it just ooze into MAGA's bloodstream so deep it doesn’t need a letter anymore? Either way, Q went from fringe cryptic prophet to baseline background radiation of the American right.
The controversy around boxer Imane Khelif’s Olympic gold continues, Greta Thunberg and the Gang sail to Gaza. 0:00 - Patriarchy So Crafty9:40 - Quest11:16 - ...
La nouvelle stratégie nationale de lutte contre la cybercriminalité se décline en « 84 actions structurantes » fleurant bon le style « bullet point » propre aux présentations PowerPoint, mais sans pour autant annoncer quelque chiffre que ce soit.
Le ministère de l’Intérieur vient de présenter sa stratégie nationale pour lutter contre la cybercriminalité, « structurée en 4 piliers, déclinés en 12 axes stratégiques, eux-mêmes détaillés en 84 actions structurantes ».
Q used to be the whole circus—now it’s just the tent. Maybe it was a psyop, maybe a LARP, maybe Five Eyes bored on a weekend. Doesn’t matter. The American populist right doesn’t need Q drops anymore—Q’s not gone, it just metastasized into the MAGA marrow.
Russia’s Primorye Territory will increase the imports of Belarusian machinery next year, Primorye Territory Governor Oleg Kozhemyako said during a meeting with Belarusian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Shuleiko.
The left acts like it’s running an occupation—educate, reform, “fix” the locals. But like Iraq, once the funding dries up or the attention shifts, people snap back to baseline. Hearts and minds only stay won when the gravy train’s rolling. youtube.com/watch?v=9FG48ME5OQ…
The controversy around boxer Imane Khelif’s Olympic gold continues, Greta Thunberg and the Gang sail to Gaza. 0:00 - Patriarchy So Crafty9:40 - Quest11:16 - ...
On June 4, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense hosted the 23rd Expert Working Group (EWG) Meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Defense Ministers' Meeting in Qingdao City, east China's Shandong Province.
Passionate about video reporting and investigation, Yanis Mhamdi is a journalist-director at Blast, a French independent media outlet. He was in the West Bank where he shot his next film, “Alice in Settlerland.
oh man new AC compressors are like $5-700. i found a video on how to remove it though so i am feeling a bit more enthusiastic today about finishing this up
Corporations aren't allied to anyone > Some corporations are pulling back from Pride. Boston LGBTQ+ organizations are trying to adapt. bostonglobe.com/2025/06/04/new…
“I'm shocked — shocked — to find that gambling is going on in here!” > Some of Trump’s Biggest Inaugural Donors Benefit From Early Government Actions - The Wall Street Journal. wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-…
If you love the news, check out The Liberty Daily's homepage. (Zero Hedge)—Back on April 14 when bond yields were soaring in the aftermath of Trump’s liberation day amid speculation that China or Japan were selling some of their US paper to stabilize…
It's time for a British or European or Canadian or Mexican or Russian dream now... > ‘They are in shock’: Indian students fear Trump has ended their American dream theguardian.com/world/2025/jun…
SANAA, June 03 (YPA) - Yemeni student, Gubran Khalil Al-Maljami, drowned off the coast of India yesterday, Monday, in a tragic accident that occurred just two days after celebrating his graduation from an Indian university.Sources close to the deceas
If the federal government printed money to fund healthcare instead of manufacturing missiles I wouldn't be so mad about government spending or the national debt
@HiroProtagonist there's so much corruption and incompetence in government, more government spending = more centralization, corruption, bureaucracy, and regulations- covid clearly demonstrated this inverse relationship between spending and quality of care. look at all the tax money they spent on covid vaccines and murdering people in hospitals. similarly, more military spending doesn't necessarily provide better security. the more money they have the more they feel a need to waste it
i would rather have government spend zero on health care tbh. charity should be voluntary.
@realcaseyrollins ✝️ If they didn't spend your money on missiles you could spend it on healthcare or whatever else you needed yourself. Anytime you give money to government in exchange for services rather than purchasing the services yourself you give up control, freedom, privacy, and usually efficiency.
Or, maybe, Russia had been showing restraint... I guess we'll see... 🙈 🙉 🙊 > Zelensky launched a string of daring raids against Russia. He’s proving to Trump that Ukraine has the cards after all yahoo.com/news/zelensky-launch…
Isn't Target 🎯 on the shitlist of both the Gay Left and Homophobic Right? > Executives at Target, Goldman Sachs and Pepsi have bemoaned "uncertainty." abcnews.go.com/Business/danger… via ABC News App
The Shock Doctrine is Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein's companion piece to her popular 2007 book of the same name. In short, the shock doctri...
Invest in burner phones, investors! Two-phone teens! TikTok is a lot like selling crack so you need two cells. > Virginia limits social media to an hour daily for kids under 16 Source: WUSA9 share.newsbreak.com/debnx33f
Personally I think that azerty was meant made by drunk students trying to troll people but it somehow caught on.
Hey, qwerty is kinda bad... You think we could try to make one that's even worse to mock it?
Oooh that'd be hilarious! Let's make a French version of qwerty but a lot worse!
I know, lets put dead keys for all accents except for the accent aigu so that when you need it on an uppercase letter you CAN'T type it!
Ahah good one! Let's also not add anyway to type an uppercase cedilla! Imagine, a French keyboard that can't type uppercase é and ç !
And what if we rearrange all the punctuation and symbols so that the open and closed parenthesis are no longer next to each other? It'd be sooo funny!
Right right! Let's do it too for the brackets and curly braces too!
Good one! How about we don't add guillemets which are used in French instead of english double quotes, so that people will be forced to type double quotes and their advanced text editors will have to automatically replace them by guillemets so that the text uses correct punctuation for French?
That's so sneaky! Let's also add § so you can cite your sources with the correct paragraph symbol, but not use real quotations marks for the quotes!
What else would be really stupid?
Let's use one key for a random greek letter!
What?
You know, like α and β?
Ermm... okay... which one? α or β?
Neither, people might actually use those once every 2 years. Let's just pick one at random!
µ it is! Has anyone even seen that letter used in a French text?
Nope, never, so it's perfect!
How about also adding ¤?
What the hell is ¤?
I haven't the faintest clue! And neither do you or most people! That why it's funny!
Sure, why not, let's cram pointless characters and not add actually useful ones like guillemets! Any other ideas?
Let's put the hyphen on the one most unreachable key!
Oh that's a good one!
I got better! Let's put the period on the same key as the semicolon, but with the semicolon as the default character, and periods will be Shift+semicolon! That way we can say that it's canonically why French phases are long-winded: it's easier to type a comma or semicolon than a period!
Man you're hilarious!
When I was still on Windows I put qwerty as my keyboard layout and used the Alt+number shortcuts for accents because that was less painful than using azerty... Those shortcuts didn't work anymore when I switched to linux so I had to find a real solution, which ended up being a colemak base which I modified to add accented letters. I don't like bepo, it moves z x c v and I like them being in the same place as in qwerty for the shortcuts I'm used to, and I didn't know qwerty-fr existed at the time 😅
So there's an ACTUALLY usable keyboard for French but no one in France even knows it exists because it's not metropolitan French? Why am I not surprised 😑
You even have division and multiplication symbols and FRACTIONS and every symbol that you might ever need? 😭 😭 😭
And it seems like it would work well for English, French and German?
I grew up en français, albeit in Canada. In our informatique classes, we had CSA standard layout keyboards (IBM, not Microsoft).
It's essentially a QWERTY keyboard with built-in compose key modifier and silkscreened characters on the board for accented characters (capitals included). Not too bad to learn on, and considering that QWERTY would be so prevalent in my life, I think it's a good compromise.
When I was in uni in the 90s and finally ran across an AZERTY keyboard, I literally couldn't use it. Not only is layout different, but the character mod sequence makes no ergonomic sense to me.
~~NB: fun fact, y a pas de mots qui commencent en C cédille. C'est pas pour dire qu'on a pas besoin de majuscules cédillées. 😀~~
NBB: ¤ is an end-of-cell marker, introduced at the advent of word processors to distinguish newline and carriage returns from the ends of cells in tables. Not sure if it had a meaning before then, but my memory is saying it had something to do with sub-paragraphs.
I know that last one as the "sun" character (circle with rays coming out) but really I once learned it's a placeholder character for "your local currency sign".
AZERTY is awful and anyone who uses it is a psychopath or even worse, french (québécois are fine though).
But jokes aside, I regularly switch between typing in French, English, and Spanish (so basically using all the accents and special characters including ñ) and even with all of it's faults, QWERTY with international layout works perfectly for me: * all accents are independent so you can capitalize upper and lower case and any kind of letter * cedilla is basically just a c with an accent and that's exactly how you type it (in Linux you might have to use a special key unless you actually mean "ć"), same for ñ * English apostrophe doubles as the accent key, if you want an apostrophe just press space after hitting the apostrophe key
I worked in France for a while and I deeply agree with everything you said... Except μ is by far the most useful Greek letter since it is used as a prefix for units of measurement, e.g. μm, μL, etc.
Also the Swiss layout is even worse, it combined all the bad features of the French and German keyboards and then just moves around all the symbols a bit more for good measure.
If you don't like BÉPO because you want familiar letter-based clipboard shortcuts, you've already made a better layout selection impossible. I learned to use the older clipboard shortcuts: ctrl+ins for copy, shift+ins for paste, and shift+del for cut. Those are still as universally supported.
Those are not nearly as conveniently located for left handed use though. Having z x c and v all easily reachable with my left pinky on control and my right hand on my mouse tops any other benefit of another keyboard layout.
I use them fine with my left hand. There's no reason to stay on home row if you're doing a lot of copy and paste. Of course, if you're doing that much copy and paste, using an extension that allows VIM shortcuts would be much faster.
As someone with a Thinkpad, that weird thing Lenovo does where they switch the control and function keys gets me every time I switch between Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad laptops.
I get that the function key isn't technically a standard key on the keyboard (I've only seen them on laptops) and Thinkpads always had that layout, but it's still annoying.
There are several Azerty layouts. Some don’t allow you to type uppercase accented letters easily, some do. I’ve switched to Linux about fifteen years ago and never had an issue typing these characters with the default layout. It used to be more complicated on Windows, I don’t know if that’s still the case. I should give it a try the next time I get the occasion to type on a Windows computer.
I currently use the fr-oss Azerty layout, which is probably not perfect but has many advantages. I love being able to type thin spaces and non breaking spaces easily.
I still don’t get why it’s easier to type a semi-colon than a full stop, though. I love semi-colons, but even I don’t use them that much.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said that the Israeli occupation is using the new mechanism it has established for distributing aid in the besieged Palestinian enclave as a “trap for mass killing in the Strip and a tool for the forced dis
Following a series of successful virtual meetings exceeding two thousand registrations, BRICS youth is preparing for next week's Summit, where elected guest observers from the seminars will take place
Welcome to a new privacy-first initiative challenging the digital identity status quo, urging a sharp turn away from the surveillance-ready infrastructure embedded in mobile driver’s licenses.
The campaign, called No Phone Home, brings together a broad alliance of civil liberties groups, privacy experts, technologists, lawmakers, and public officials who are resisting the ways digital IDs compromise people’s rights.
What’s fueling the campaign is concern over how mobile driver’s licenses, increasingly adopted in the US and abroad, are built atop a technical framework that allows them to silently transmit data back to issuing authorities. While this function may not be active by default, it exists; and that, privacy advocates argue, is a serious vulnerability.
Even if unused, if the architecture allows for data to be sent back to government servers, it eventually will be the campaign’s statement warns.
nous
in reply to utnapishtim • • •It will be challenging but IMO give it a shot if you think it is something you might want to do. No harm in trying really. If you mess it up or find it too hard or whatever you can always install something else afterwards. It is not like you are stuck with your first choice forever. The only thing you will lose is a bit of time and will gain a better understanding of things even if you cannot make it fully work.
I don't agree that arch is not a beginner distro - it is a DIY distro that requires a lot of reading and willingness to learn and understand things. The arch wiki is an excellent resource for anyone (on any distro IMO) and well worth reading. If you are OK with that work then it makes a fine distro for anyone, beginner or not. It is not a distro for many people - again does not matter if they are a beginner or not. It is for people with a particular mindset. One that you might change over time or as you grow and learn more overall.
No harm either if you decide it is not for you. Play around with a few distros and try to find which one works best for you. There is really no one best distro. Just a lot of different things that appeal to different people and the only real way to find out which you like is to try them out.
WuxinGoat
Unknown parent • • •Fedora Spins | The Fedora Project
fedoraproject.orgWuxinGoat
Unknown parent • • •enemenemu
Unknown parent • • •Why wouldn't an atomic distro not be for beginners?
There's no reason why a beginner wouldn't be able to use one. Maybe i's overwhelming for a power user that doesn't know linux well but for a beginner who doesn't use too much functionality it's perfect. You just use flatpak which you should also do on non atomic distros.
Eugenia
in reply to utnapishtim • • •I suggest Linux Mint. It has GUIs for almost everything and it's very stable. With a little bit of tinkering of the services at startup, you can get Mint to run at 700 MB of RAM (as read via htop), instead of its default ~1 GB of RAM. That could be important to fit it better at 4 GB of ram with some demanding browsing.
I disagree with anyone who might suggest Fedora or Ubuntu with 4 GB of RAM. These distros require about 2+ GB of RAM to boot up, double than that of Mint.
Then there are the distros meant for older machines that use less ram, but it's a shame to use these when your laptop is fast-enough with an 8th gen cpu (comparatively to very old machines, that is).
The lowest ram usage I've seen with a full-fledge distro/DE, is XFce with endeavourOS. I load it at 490 MB of RAM (it takes 630 MB on Mint for the same layout/apps).
Basically, your challenge is the RAM, not the CPU or the drive. Use an appropriate distro for the RAM and the difficulty you want, and always be mindful to not have too many tabs/apps open at the same time.
Fecundpossum
in reply to utnapishtim • • •I commented elsewhere about endeavourOS, but I have some other wisdom to pass along.
Keep good backups of your personal files, stuff you don’t want to lose, and don’t be afraid to try something new. You dont like something about how your system is running? Nuke it and install something else. Installing Linux is a cakewalk in most distros and rarely takes longer than half an hour (your mileage may vary with the low specs on the laptop)
I’ve learned a ton about Linux by trying many different distros, breaking things, fixing things, and occasionally distro hopping to see how I like a different offering.
There’s a lot of great content on YouTube that can help you learn, and reviews of various distros so you can get an idea of how things work without having to install it yourself. Have fun and don’t be afraid to fiddle with things.