AntiX is pretty good.

Q4OS has great potential. As long as you install lightweight applications (Falkon browser, Yakuake terminal, Calligra Office Suite, etc.) and uninstall the heavy stuff (Google Chrome, Kinsole, KOffice, etc. ) you will have a pretty fast operating system and a very good desktop experience.

A 14-year old computer with8GB of RAM would have cost a small fortune back then. Most people had machines with 2 to 4 GB at best (2GB was very common). Everything I run here is 2GB. I had an HP laptop I upgraded the RAM on and within 4 months, the laptop died so I was back to 2GB machines.

I’ve got a tower machine (HP Compaq Pressario) with only 2GB of RAM. It used to run Vista (so it’s probably about 15 years old). About the only thing that runs nicely on it is Linux Lite.

I like other light distros too but they all have their pros and cons. Linux Lite is the closest to the best of all worlds. Some distros like Mint (using XFCE) start off with little RAM usage and then spike up rapidly once you open a browser or a few other apps so it’s only a matter of time before it lags and locks up.

I have an older Acer Cloudbook and it only has 2GB of RAM too. I ran MX-Linux for awhile but it wasn’t that easy on RAM. Linux Mint ran okay for quite awhile (oddly enough) but the more recent releases are pigs on RAM. So I switched over to Peppermint Linux 7 (even though 10 and 11 were just out). I was fiddling with the internet connection apps and now it won’t allow my browsers to connect to the web. So if I can’t solve the problem I’ll probably wipe it clean and install the latest Peppermint or Linux Lite. There doesn’t appear to be any means to upgrade the RAM on that laptop.

In any case, my point is that what runs smoothly depends on many factors, not just RAM. The trend seems to be more resources are required with each so-called distro upgrade. I’ve got an ancient IBM Thinkpad T23 that runs Puppy Linux so-so. The older browser don’t like most modern websites and I don’t want to bother replacing Puppy with a more modern version of Puppy Linux. Not worth my time now.

I suggest people use Ventoy to make their bootable USB sticks (which can be tricky for a novice to set up and understand) and just dump as many lite distros as you can and try ’em out one by one.

Thanks for pointing it out. I just updated the image.

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Today, LXLE is a dormant distribution.

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You wrote that Lite distribution has 32-bit support. According to distrowatch, it does not.

Gérard

Yes, on my old computer with Core2 and 8G RAM, Fedora 36 works soomthly.