1y ago

What distro would you recommend for a 32-bit old Acer One laptop?

It's an old model (Acer One D257) Processor is Intel Atom. Memory is 1GB DDR3 with 320 GB of HDD. I currently Have MX 21 running on it, but I need to reinstall because I forgot the root password. Since I'm reinstalling the OS, I thought I'd ask here for recommendations for an OS that makes the most of this oldie.

67 comments

Debian
- Isnt min suggested 2GB for debian? Well I was running it on 1GB
  
  I installed it successfully on a 512 MB machine the other day, with LXQT. Didn't run very well though.
- Yeah it's going to be a debian-based at least, that's for sure
  
  Debian based distros can be very different from each other. Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, etc are all based off debian. I think what the commenter you're replying to is saying is to install the stock debian image, because that's the lightest version of debian.
  
  I used to like Debian based (and still do; I use it on my server with no intention of switching) but Opensuse is great on the desktop and supports 32 bit. Even tumbleweed is rock solid.

The Distro is not important, just debloat it. Something like Alpine is actually smaller, but in the end the Desktop needs to be tiny.
- Good point. Thanks
  
  If you can run the Raspberry Pi Desktop that would be good. Wayland and I think very light.
  I am thinking about installing that on Fedora, rebranding and all, to have an actually small Wayland Desktop, because the current options are either WMs or bigger Desktops
- The Distro is not important
  Most distros have dropped 32bit UEFI support, so on old hardware, the distro is important.

Personally I am using a netbook like this as a headless server with Ubuntu.
You can try to run Lubuntu, or even TinyCore and Puppy Linux on this for simple tasks.
Generally speaking, with 1GB of ram and Intel atom, as you stay away from video streaming platforms and use simple tools for writing text or run simple code in python, you would be fine. However with less than 100€ you can find laptops with core i5 4rd generation with 8gb ram. I am not sure if it worths it.
- I had similar netbook like OP and was running Lubuntu for a very long time but afaik they dropped support for 32 bit architectures some time ago. I think 18.04 was the last 32 bit LTS? Not sure, I'd need to check it

Puppy Linux is very active on the 32bit land.
- either that or damn small linux
  
  There's also TinyCore, made by the lead developer of Damn Small Linux after it stopped being developed.

Debian with the choice of LXDE as window manager. Debian offers high configurability to remove any heavy component.
- That's a good point, I could jus try debian and remove the unnecessary stuff. I want my daughter to use this laptop so it needs some video codecs and hopefully some educational games.
  Some commenters said you need a minimum of 2GB memory to run Debian. What do you make of that?
  
  See this: https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/ch03s04.en.html Minimum 1Gb, preferably 2 for a desktop.
  
  Don't want to hurt your daughter. And don't want to hurt the Linux community by making a girl hate Linux when she's a child.

I'd recommend Alpine and running it headless. Realistically you'd need 4GB+ of ram to run a modern desktop session so that's not ideal. However running Alpine headless will leave you with 800M to run programs.
You can still run a GUI desktop on it but I'd recommend having a nice sized swap partition/file to make up for it. It'll be slow as soon as you hit the 1GB memory and starting swapping out.
- It's not the desktop that needs 4 GB, it's large apps like modern browser or office. The desktop will run fine on 1 GB. May want to look into Midori and Abiword as alternatives.
  
  Absolutely correct, Alpine can run a desktop environment with 500 megs.

The only distro I could get to boot on my old Acer One was MX Linux.
It had the rare combination of 32bit UEFI support (cause the Acer supports neither 64bit UEFI nor legacy BIOS) and the necessary firmware out of the box.
But after upgrading it to the current release, it broke again. And then I threw the netbook away cause I have better things to do with my time.
- Oh shit, what newest release did you upgrade to? I think I have MX21 in my Acer one
  
  23, the one that is based on Debian Bookworm.
  21.3 worked fine.
  
  If you don't want to reinstall just cause you forgot your password:
  https://linuxconfig.org/recover-reset-forgotten-linux-root-password

You might be able to reset the root password by booting to single user, or using a rescue usb.
That said, you could take the chance to try one of the BSDs.

Whatever distro you install, make sure you enable zram, it makes old computers with low ram much more usable, and an out of memory killer too.
- Ooms are much less necessary with MGLRU if they keep to a new kernel
  
  I'd still use an oom killer even on 6.1 which is the kernel Debian uses, mglru got improvements in following kernels like you said.
- Thanks! Great advice 👍

See if you can get the memory upgraded. DDR3 SO-DIMMs should be dirt cheap.
I'd also get a cheap SSD aswell, especially if this is for a child who might not be very careful with the machine.
- Hmmm yeah I hadn't thought about upgrading the laptop, that's a big idea, and indeed it should be super cheap
  
  I use super old hardware as well. An SSD will blow your mind.

yeah MX21 32bits is what I would install, or AntiX.
Can't you boot on a USB key and reset the root password on your HD partition?
- AntiX! Of course. I thought Antix had merged with Mepis to create MX. Didn't know they were still around. probably the best choice since it still seems to be based on Debian Stable
  
  AntiX is awesome on old HW, everything works, just don't load a big website in the browser or it crawls :)

Alpine Linux could be worth giving a shot very lightweight!
- Interesting. I search for Alpine Linux and the first search result was a Lemmy community. Looks interesting. Thanks!

I have no experience for this matter, nor a lot of Linux either, but there seem to be some interesting choices here (there isn't best and worst, it's just a list, and the most adapted to what you need).
https://itsfoss.com/32-bit-linux-distributions/
Obviously the minimum system requirements should not be your max amount of ram. You need to account for apps or tools you'll run.
- Thanks, that list was very helpful in confirming some of the ideas I already had.

One distro that I've recently found runs pretty well on older/slower systems like this is wattOS. It's a distro focused on power efficiency, but because of that it does well on underpowered systems.

If you don't have to use it but want to keep it functional, why just not reinstall MX again? You know that and how it works
- Because it does give me a functional piece of software to grab YouTube videos without actually opening YouTube, but it cannot really run Firefox with uBlock, which basically means web browsing is impossible

I'd probably try a minimal Debian installation with the Openbox WM.
Link, in case you're having trouble locating the .iso: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-12.2.0-i386-netinst.iso

Something like Sugar or Doudoulinux would perhaps be more suitable for your daughter.
Doudoulinux has not been updated since ages , but it will run very well on any old laptop.
- Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check those out

AntiX or Arch 32 bit
- Yeah I'm going with AntiX. Used it a long time ago and assumed it had merged with Mepis to do MX, but thanks to this thread I find out it's still available

Arch Linux 32.

I would recommend FreeDOS
- Thanks but the laptop is for my 3-yeard old daughter. I hope she becomes a linux user but she's not there yet (to use FreeDOS) :)
  
  I put galliumOS on the laptop for my toddler... he likes it! But thats a specific distro for a specific netbook. Whatever you get, try GCompris, it's a good collection of educational software

Lubuntu

67 comments