I am planning to give a new breath to an old Asus eee 700 (500M Ram, 4G HDD, 7inch display). Looking around at google, all the related posts seem to be badly dated.

Anyone has an idea what is a suitable modern distro/desktop for such a small screen? I would love to use it for basic web browsing and perhaps as media player (if it is powerful enough). I might experiment with lubuntu/lxde on the one hand, but perhaps something completely different fits better (android?). It should also be usable for computer-illiterates, so puppuy will probably be voted down...

I used to run Arch on mine and later SalixOS, both ran nicely.

As for a Desktop and browser evilwm and Opera with a tweaked config, allowed for great use of the limited screen real estate.

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eeepc_toolbar_config.png (92.0 KB, 6 views)

I use a trimmed down Slackware with i3 WM on mine, but this seems not to be what you aim at.
If I would have to choose a different (more "user-friendly") OS/WM I would tend to use a minimal Debian (with Openbox), Salix (LXDE version, core install with added applications), Crunchbang or maybe Bodhi Linux.

As a minimal Debian, you could also go for AntiX-core or AntiX-base. AntiX-base comes with dwm, wmii and jwm -It's all very lightweight and suitable. Because it's based on debian you've got everything else under your fingertips. You can find some suggestions on the installproces on this page

I note you say that you're going to give it to a computer illiterate, so that rules out some suggestions. I'd go for something with a simple window manager (less pressure on screen space) but which is still user friendly: AntiX or Swift with Icewm, or the Fluxbox version of Salix.

I think they both are quite user friendly. But I think AntiX will give better performance, especially in boottime.

Hi, thank you all for suggestions. So long I have played around with small debian with LXDE in a virtual machine. It looks quite good in terms of memory and disk, but the user interface might include large icons as default (something like Android/iPhone have). I will also give Antix a try.

What is the best choice for browser in terms of memory footprint?

Midori is pretty light.

I've just checked my system, and with two windows open, Firefox weighs in at 50MiB but Opera at 86MiB. That's a surprise: for some reason, I always thought Opera was light.