AntiX.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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My friend always recommended puppy linux fur such devices, he was very happy with it
I personally think alpine might be a good fit, it is very lightweight. It does not use systemd though and is therefore in many ways different than most distros(for some this is a good thing). I know it from postmarketOS (optimised for phone hardware)
Other than that, you may just take Arch, as it comes pretty minimal and you can choose for every package to use the most lightweight solution
Or you can go even more personalised with gentoo, linuxFroScratch or yocto. Just requires some skill, but skill can always be acquired by learning and doing.
Unfortunately, modern web browsers are horrible pigs. No matter what distro you put on this thing, interacting with webpages will be s-l-o-w. (I have a similar laptop—2 GB RAM, Athlon64x2 CPU—running Gentoo, and while it's functional in its primary job of "larger-screen video iPod for 720p or less", starting a browser takes a while.) The niche your friend wants to make this machine fill is about the worst one possible for it.
Fedora.
It seems to be easy to manage and fast to install.
SUSE is slow to run and self-update.
Debian is far behind and Ubuntu seems to always have an issue during or right after installation.
Why wouldn't Debian run?
Debian is the OS, with its package manager and some applications suggested by default. You can install Debian with X, without X, with a certain window manager or another, etc. So... Debian WILL 100% run, the question rather is WHICH software should you pick that gives the best compromise between ease of use (specific to that person) AND performance (specific to that computer).
PS: to be clear, that's the same for other distributions. There are distributions that specifically target older hardware and that in turn might facilitate the process but usually if you do check how such distributions are done, they are basically Debian (or NixOS or Alpine or whatever) with a specific package selection. It's rare (if ever? counter-example) to have anything special that would somehow "boost" performance for hardware, especially here when it's rather common hardware.
FWIW I did run on old hardware with ratpoison and had a blazing fast experience, much more responsive than "top" hardware back then. So... yes IMHO it's about the wm/de usually, the rest follows. Obviously you can't run super demanding software, e.g. video editing, 3D modeling, etc but that's usually rather obvious.
AntiX or Alpine
ZorinOS
Heavily customized LFS
Probably Fedora.
Mx linux with fluxbox
Lubuntu has always been solid for me for low spec machines.
With only 2 gb of RAM it will be slow, there is almost no avoiding that part.
it will be slow
Then it's a bad recommendation.