Ditstribution/DE suggestions needed.

[Polymorphus Magnus]

Hello fine folk of the linux.org!

So I've got my hands on the ASUS EEE 700x. Barely any ram or just storage space (256Mb and around 2-ish GB). I do not intend to use it for anything extraordinary. mostly presentations and documents work, maybe internet browsing. What would be the lightest distro or DE for it. I had used Nobara in the past as my first distro for around a year and a half before I realized that I'm lagging behind by four major updates and after unsuccessfully attempting to hop to Arch I rolled back to modded Win10.

I would like to try and finally get through installation of the linux Arch, but if there are better alternatives I'd really like to know.
I'm relatively familiar with KDE as a desktop environment but I'm afraid it's a bit too much for a laptop with total 2GB of storage space so I'd like to know if there are DEs that would be light enough yet provide reasonably comparative experience to the one of the KDE.

Oh, and if anyone owns/owned one in the past and ran linux on it, is there anything I should be wary of? Like drivers trouble and such.

 

[Brickwizard]

Welcome
if this machine has the single core Celeron M CPU then you have about had it, 32 bit linux is coming to an end [you need at least a Pentium twin core to run 64 bit Linux]

 

[CaffeineAddict]

LXDE is poorly maintained, the alternative is XFCE or no DE but window manager only.

 

[ron.alan]

I'd suggest Mate as your DE. Xfce isn't as light as it used to be.

 

[Brickwizard]

Some 32 bit offerings, but remember support wili end sooner than later.

AntiX
NixOS
Devuan
Void
Q4OS
Bunsen labs
Sparky
Alpine
and Puppy Linux this runs from ram on almost any old kit but its not like normal Linux

 

[kc1di]

Hello @Polymorphus Magnus
Welcome to the Linux. Org forum, enjoy!
With that little bit for ram it going to be difficult to get any linux Distro running. and if you do any browser will be almost worthless. Is there any way to increase the ram? But this page may gives some Idea. They use Dam small Linux.

Damn Small Linux revived my aging Eee PC. Here’s how to use it to resurrect any old computer.

Even an 18-year-old netbook can browse the modern web.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[theLegionWithin]

with low ram like that it'd be better as a headless setup (no gui)

 

[Polymorphus Magnus]

Hello @Polymorphus Magnus
Welcome to the Linux. Org forum, enjoy!
With that little bit for ram it going to be difficult to get any linux Distro running. and if you do any browser will be almost worthless. Is there any way to increase the ram? But this page may gives some Idea. They use Dam small Linux.

This laptop has everything soldered onto the motherboard. I'm not sure if I could even locate the chip responsible for RAM, let alone solder it out and swap for another one. The thing has no SODIMM slots.

 

[Polymorphus Magnus]

with low ram like that it'd be better as a headless setup (no gui)

I'm still quite afraid of terminal, I managed to do some managing in Nobara (Mostly just blindly following the tutorials on the web) and that's about it. Maybe sometime in a future.

 

[MikeRocor]

I've never had an EeePC to play with, but I've run Tiny Core Linux on some pretty low spec kit. The low specs may limit what you can actually -do- with the thing, but it will very likely boot the OS. If you are terminal-averse, that might not be the OS for you.

 

[Polymorphus Magnus]

Well, it seems that I will never boot from the USB on this machine since it always gives me "auto-detecting USB mass storage devices" and then lists whatever USB drives that are connected + one empty "Device" and proceeds to do nothing afterwards. Maybe I'll resolve that someday but for now I'll have to somehow use it with the WinXP that's already installed there.

UPD:
Nevermind. Turns out I just had to do the very same steps I've done before in attempt to fix it, for the third time and it booted.

 

[Polymorphus Magnus]

To anyone who's still curious about the fate of that laptop with a concerning amount of E in the name.

I've looked through the suggestions and while they are all valid, I didn't find a distro that would be less resource intensive than a MicroXP modifications of the WinXP. Which consumes around 50-60MB of RAM when idling, takes up very little space (ISO itself for example was just a bit shy from 80MB). And it's more familiar to me than some Linux distribution from the same age, where similar, or even better (in terms of memory consuption) results could be achieved.

I'm still very grateful for your help, some of the suggested distributions are now on my "try out sometime" list.

 

[KGIII]

MicroXP

That's old and unsupported. It is horribly insecure. If you're using this online, you're very likely to face issues -- and potentially cause issues for other people. If your device is compromized, it could easily become a node in a DDoS or spam attack. That impacts other people, not just yourself.