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The title says it all. I have an old Toshiba Satellite that was made for Windows Vista that I'm thinking of installing Lubuntu on. The problem is, it's limping along with 1GB of RAM. Yes, I could buy more and install it, but I'm wondering if I can get by with that 1GB using Lubuntu?
I'm wondering if I can get by with that 1GB using Lubuntu?
Should go quite easily.
In fact today I saw an announcement for a new version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (15.1, to be released in May), which had
Quote:
MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Personal computer with an AMD64 or Intel64 processor
1 GB physical RAM
4 GB available disk space
1024x768 display resolution
3D accelerated (openGL) graphics chipset
And that comes with GNOME 3, quite a bit more heavy then LXQT, which lubuntu uses.
Memory (RAM): for advanced internet services like Google+, YouTube, Google Drive, and Facebook, your computer needs at least 1 GB of RAM. For local programs like LibreOffice and simple browsing habits, your computer needs at least 512 MB of RAM.
It depends on how you use the computer and what applications you run. I consider it to be the minimum RAM meaning it will work but just barely. antix or Bodhi are a couple of other distributions designed to run on older computers.
A light GUI will go a long ways to mitigating the performance issues caused by lack of RAM. Do expect long boot times, and if you are using Chrome or any fork built on Chrome if you have more than 2 tabs open except times when the system will become unresponsive.
Even with 4G RAM if I am running Chrome with more than 4 tabs, there are times my system just sits there and will not respond. That is caused by Chrome sucking up RAM and the Kernel attempting to free up RAM to continue running the system.
8G RAM helps even more on my old 8yr laptop. With 4G, it is usable if I am careful. 8G I can be a bit reckless with how many applications and tabs I have running.
I have run VM's with 1G RAM. Modern GUIs and Chrome will cause performance crunch issues. Firefox is not as heavy, and there are lighter web browsers out there you could consider as well.
Good luck and have fun playing with the old hardware.
A light GUI will go a long ways to mitigating the performance issues caused by lack of RAM. Do expect long boot times, and if you are using Chrome or any fork built on Chrome if you have more than 2 tabs open except times when the system will become unresponsive.
Even with 4G RAM if I am running Chrome with more than 4 tabs, there are times my system just sits there and will not respond. That is caused by Chrome sucking up RAM and the Kernel attempting to free up RAM to continue running the system.
8G RAM helps even more on my old 8yr laptop. With 4G, it is usable if I am careful. 8G I can be a bit reckless with how many applications and tabs I have running.
I have run VM's with 1G RAM. Modern GUIs and Chrome will cause performance crunch issues. Firefox is not as heavy, and there are lighter web browsers out there you could consider as well.
Good luck and have fun playing with the old hardware.
I agree with lleb.
I use Kubuntu. I used it on 2 systems with 4 GB of RAM. It is simply not enough because I use Firefox, have 10 tabs open + Libreoffice + Kalc + Kate + Steam + QtCreator. It will start swapping and the GUI no longer responds and I have to pull the plug.
I updated to 8 GB of RAM and I can see that sometimes, I use 6.5 GB of RAM.
These are modern OSes and modern apps and they are RAM hogs.
I don't know have experience with Lubuntu.
Every distro likes 2 GB better then 1 (and 4 even more so), but lubuntu, having a rather minimal DE, should work better on 1 then the distro's with more heavy DE's, like kubuntu or ubuntu itself.
1GB should be usable with Lubuntu, just don't go crazy with browser tabs or you'll end up swapping and slow. But Bodhi would probably work even better.
The Lubuntu developers have announced today that their LXDE/LXQt downstream of Ubuntu Linux will no longer be offering 32-bit x86 releases moving forward while Lubuntu 18.04 LTS will continue to be supported. Earlier this month Xubuntu announced that their Xfce spin would stop offering 32-bit ISOs for future releases.Dec 20, 2018
to be blunt i for one am glad to see 32bit support going away. 64bit systems have been out since the last 90's early 2000's. Lets face it, roughly 20 year old CPU, do we really want to be using them for anything other than goofing around?
Just me. Sorry that might piss some folks off...
The OP didnt mention his CPU for that old laptop. There is a fair chance he has a 64bit CPU even though the system was built to run Vista and only has 1G ram.
Hopefully it is not an old Intel Celeron 32bit chip. While they run forever their performance was never on par with AMD's lower end chips and they are only good at not consuming much power in the form of Watts.
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