Mint.

It’s extremely stable Linux for your grandma, that comes with every tool that she will ever use and on the cinnamon interface all those tools are exactly where she will expect them to be if she is used to using Windows.

I’ve gotten three boomers to use it and they hardly ever ask for tech support because it’s so stable.

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.

As another said on the thread — it’s not really Linux that is the issue here as much as the internet. Browsers are just memory hogs now and you’re not going to get an enjoyable experience on 2gb of ram imo, if the goal is to have a functional laptop. OTOH, it would be a great little project server to play around with things like pihole or your Arrs🏴‍☠️ or other self hosting goodness.

Run a 32 bit distro. It is the only thing that will run well on 2 GB of RAM. It will run better than you think.

Q4OS, Antix, MX Linux, Damn Small Linux, and even pure 32 bit Debian are decent candidates. If you use Q4, give the Trinity desktop a shot.

I like Andelie Linux as well but MUSL may cause problems for an unsophisticated user.

puppy linux. ironically its made to run completely in memory but only needs like 500meg

Your biggest problem is the amount of RAM, not the cpu. Some Linux distros would fit nicely on 2gb with a few native apps open, but the moment you’d want to browse the web, all hell will break loose, as each tab will take hundreds of megs each (youtube takes between 600 and 1200 mb of ram). FYI, even if chrome/ium is hated in these parts, it uses less ram than firefox (there’s also a setting to use even less ram).

I’d suggest you use either Alpine Linux with xfce (240 MB of RAM on a cold boot), or even better, Q4OS with the Trinity Desktop (fork of KDE), 350 MB of RAM. The advantage of Q4OS is that it’s a debian, so it can run lots of .deb files made for debian. Alpine is cool and all, but it has bugs on the desktop (some of its package management has dependency problems).

A tip: to save ram, don’t use background images, only a single color. You can save up to 50 MB of RAM that way, depending on the image you’d be using.

honestly the distro doesn’t matter so much as long as the hardware i supported. run a minimal desktop, disable CPU hogs and file indexing etc.

I used fvwm on Debian for many years on old computers. worked great. now I have kde/plasma on arch. my 10 year old laptop handles it fine…

To be honest, I wouldn’t on a 2Gb laptop. It’ll run Linux just fine but the minute you use a browser or office suite you’ll have memory problems.

Upgrade that box or repurpose it for something else. Web bloat has made 2gb machines useless for browsing and 4gb marginal, if the user needs Google docs, put in 8gb or more.