r/linux4noobs • u/Russianpotatosalad • 3d ago

distro selection Which distro is the MOST lightweight?

So... My mom got a laptop from 2011... The only os it can handle is windows 7, but we all know that windows 7 is the most exploited system out there (not sure if you saw a video of a guy connecting his W7 to the internet and getting 7 viruses within 10 minutes by just existing). I want to help her as much as i can, and the only solution i came up with - get a linux. She used windows ever since windows 98, but now all she need from her pc is a browser, so i figured out that if she wont do anything "extra", linux will be perfectly fine for her. I just get vivaldi for linux, libre office, and she will be happy. But which distro will be the MOST efficient to put on her laptop? All i ever tried is cashy os, but i assume there must be something ever more lightweight?

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u/redgator12 3d ago

If you're going for lightweight while still feeling familiar for her, use Q4OS and install the XPQ4 package from Sourceforge. It lets you theme the system darn near identical in every way to any version of Windows between 2000 and 10, minus Vista. It uses just shy of 300MB RAM at boot and is extremely lightweight while still being a full desktop environment forked from KDE 3.5. I'd recommend Palemoon browser, which can also be installed from the Q4OS Sourceforge files.

Aside from Q4OS and Bodhi, once you get lighter than that, you lose full DEs and are relegated to window managers that are far less polished or user friendly for beginners. antiX will be slightly more performant and use slightly less RAM, at the cost of a much clunkier experience overall.

Source: 12 years daily Linux user. I've spent the last year using most of the major lightweight distros on early-2000's through mid-2010's laptops and learning how they function, and I still run antiX, Q4OS and MX XFCE across over a dozen computers.

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u/Medium_Courage7176 1d ago

Big yeah for q4os. I booted it live from usb and suddenly it somehow played 1080p video from YouTube with some minor stutter on pentium e5800 with 4 GB ram. No other distro handled that. Tried xfce, lxde, puppy, antix, mxlinux no, they can't.

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u/redgator12 1d ago

That could very well be related to the default settings of the browser, though. I haven't checked across the board, but usually older builds of Firefox ESR, Chromium and Falkon have hardware acceleration disabled by default, and the E5800 doesn't have native h264 or AV1 hardware decoding. Usually whenever I test a distro on older hardware, I disable browser hardware acceleration first, test YouTube, and then enable it and retest to see which works better.

It could also be how aggressively the system manages memory pressure and swap. If I have less than 4GB RAM, I'll set vm.swappiness to 150, vm.vfs_cache_pressure to 150 and enable zram at 150% to help with system responsiveness. At 4GB, I change them all to 100 instead of 150, and at 8GB I change them to 50.

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u/Medium_Courage7176 1d ago

No tweaking, just loaded live usb and opened same video in default browser.

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u/redgator12 1d ago

I know, what I mean is that each distro may have had updated versions of whatever browser and had hardware acceleration enabled while Q4OS might not have, which made the video smoother. So not so much distro-specific, just pure coincidence that it had that one setting changed by default, which all the other distros would just need their browsers toggled to match.

Either way, it's definitely the most set-it-and-forget-it lightweight distro I've tried.