My author friend has an old Dell Inspiron that is well out of windows support and wonders if a) will Linux work on it and b) which is the most appropriate given the very limited system resources? A look in previous posts, I think suggest that the video driver is might be an issue, but she is not a gamer, just text and occasional internet for research. The lack of Ram is clearly going to be an issue I think. I would have liked to have recommended Mint, but I am not sure if Xfce or Mate would be too system hungry. Any distro would need to be new user friendly really. I suspect it may be going to the recycler if she can't add more ram!

The system details are
Dell Inspiron 1010 running Intel (R) Atom, CPU Z520 @ 1.33GHz / 798 MHz, 0.99Gb RAM, using MS XP v2002 with service pack 3.

Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 500; Direct X version 9.0c; physical memory 1014MB; minimum graphics memory 64MB/max 253MB; processor x86 Family 6 Model 28 Stepping 2, processor speed 1330MHz

Wireless Network Connection: Dell Wireless 1397 WLAN mini card

Thanks for reading.

I normally recommend MX Linux or AntiX for old machines, but in this case you might want to take a look at SliTaz.

Old 1GB ram machines struggle with modern browsers, but they do still work, albeit slowly, so when you do the installation give it a 2GB swap partition.

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OP doesn't have just any old old machine, he has an Atom, low powered even when new. Here's a whole article answering his question that mentioned neither AntiX nor MX nor SliTaz. But for Atom, I would have answered sooner, and also suggested AntiX. I have a bunch of 32bit PCs with 1.5G or less RAM, but none still in use with less than 2.0GHz GPU. Regardless of distro choice, it's worth giving KDE3 or TDE a look. I use both, on either openSUSE Tumbleweed (either one), Debian (TDE), Mageia (TDE), Ubuntu (TDE) or Fedora (TDE).

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It's not just the Atom - the GMA500 was a piece of crap. Intel should have been strangled for foisting that on an unsuspecting world.
It wasn't just bad, it was abysmal.

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I agree with syg00: Your friend's computer is not a good candidate for the Linux operating system due to the GMA500 chipset.

A couple of my writer friends have switched over to Chromebooks. They like the price and portability, plus the fact that their writing is continually backed up to the Google cloud and synced between their devices. Just a thought.

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I agree with Snowpine- I use various linux distros but use google chrome/google docs to write my short stories, in the cloud and backed up on my laptop.
Check out GalliumOS its made for chromebooks
https://galliumos.org/

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This describes the problem with the graphics, written back in 2013
https://wiki.debian.org/IntelEmbedde...GraphicsDriver
You note that there's a package for Ubuntu mentioned, so Lubuntu would be a possibility rather than AntiX and MX, which are closer to Debian in behaviour.

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Thanks this is what I thought from the earlier threads. I suspect a waste of time and will give the user a poor first time Linux experience which I would want to avoid. I have found Mint so easy to use and like, that I never want to use a windows machine again.

Thanks again for all the considered replies, it is very much appreciated.

netinst light WM