Hi Group!

This is the machine:

E528-2821

Intel Celeron 900
15.6" 16:9 HD LCD
Intel GMA 4500M
2GB DDR3 Memory

250GB (Hitachi) HDD
DVD-Super Multi DL drive
802.11b/g/n Bluetooth excluded
4-cell Li-ion battery

[I didn't determine if it was 64-bit or not.]

It belongs to one of my ex-wives (I have two).

Her needs are simple:

(1) Listen to music (I gave her a USB-powered FM transmitter dongle that plugs into the audio jack, so she can hear music on any radio in the house.)
(2) Read ebooks
(3) Watch videos

I (mistakenly) installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and blew away Windows Home Edition. It is as deathly slow as Windows Home was.

Any suggestions of a distro that might run on this "cripple" and fill the bill for those 3 needs?

Thanks in advance,

- Ralph

You want to stay away from anything gnome based like mint with that hardware. You just don't have the horses to run it well as you found out. You could try some xfce based distros like MX linux:

https://mxlinux.org/download-links/

Your cpu is 64bit so download the Xfce MX-23_x64 version.

Celeron is the code name for the least powerful Intel processors and the Celeron 900 is an old, single-core model.

If you still have Mint on that system, try switching to Mate. Just install and switch desktops from the log-in screen. If that doesn't help, then try Xfce. I'd stick to Mint if you can, since (1) it's there and (2) it's friendlier than MX.

If that computer is not up to Xfce, then you are going to fall back on a much simpler GUI. You'll need to install AntiX — that will work on almost anything, even on your relic!

Antix or Bodhi. With only 2GB memory, I wouldn't waste it on xfce, rather save it for apps or another browser tab

AntiX (Base) or Devuan (Live) will work OK'ish, but that processor is really slow, videos may be a problem, & best to give it about 2GB of swap too.

I'd stick with a 32bit O/S on it as well.

Others to try, SliTaz, Tiny Core Plus, etc.

For youtube videos, I'd recommend using smtube. It'll likely play 720p video without issue, whereas in a browser you may be lucky to get 360p.

Be sure you have swap.

So I went looking about the CPU - it *is* 64-bit, and I can't imagine there would be a downside to using 64-bit on it (I have an old Athlon64 kicking around that is probably a bit worse off than that Celeron, and it handles 64-bit Xubuntu just fine for certain uses). I would probably look into some very lightweight UI like IceWM, and probably you will not get YouTube or similar working nicely because of a likely lack of any hardware acceleration (I don't know how well GMA 4500 is still supported but its very early days of any hardware video acceleration anyways and most things online have long since moved on to newer codecs). If you didn't care about the videos this could probably work just fine with even something like Ubuntu, and just install IceWM and use that in place of GNOME, but if you want videos from modern commercial sites like YouTube or various subscriptions, you should get a new(er) machine that will properly handle modern codecs in hardware, has more memory and CPU resources, can better deal with the reality of modern browsers + DRM + video bandwidth. To be clear: a modern quad-core+ (in the last 5-7 generations) Intel CPU with its integrated graphics will fit this bill, and you can probably find some off-lease office machine with such a chip and 4-16GB of RAM for peanuts these days.

I don't necessarily recommend it cuz some apps today don't offer 32-bit versions, but for a system with only 2GB memory, I do understand why someone recommended 32-bit OS - it's more memory efficient. You wouldn't even need a kernel with PAE, so even more efficient. The technical details as to why I'm no expert on explaining, but has something to do with every time something needs to save something to memory, it has to use a whole 64-bit block, even if its a single bit, so when there's 32-bits or less to store in memory, a 32-bit os only uses half as much as a 64-bit OS to store it.

That being said, I also have an athlon64, mine has 3GB memory, and I run a 64-bit OS on it, even tho I know 32-bit would be more memory efficient. I just don't open 10 browser tabs at once, I monitor memory usage and stay out of swap, and runs just fine.

But I also have an old 32-bit Pentium 4 (running 32-bit OS with non-PAE kernel) and it works just fine too, the main apps that don't support 32-bit are proprietary stuff like discord or google-chrome and any electron apps, but all the stuff in debian repos works just fine. (Other than chromium - it requires SSE2 that cpu doesn't have, but firefox is fine.)

This explanation makes sense as a 'downside' - I vaguely remember trying 32-bit Slackware on an old server (which had something ridiculous like 96GB of RAM) just to play around with PAE and noticing 'slightly less' memory usage as it sat on the desktop, but that is hardly a 'good test' because I didn't also try out 64-bit Slackware on the same machine (I just wanted to see PAE work ), and my reasoning is/was that a lot of applications have moved to 64-bit exclusive and if the CPU can do it, why not? But memory efficiency probably makes sense with 2GB. I'll also add: I don't even have a browser installed on my Athlon64, so I have no frame of reference for what trying to browse the web is like in 2023 on 4GB or less.