Friend has an old laptop with windows 10 that he doesn’t use because too slow and freezing all the time. Wants to revive it to leave at his lab in grad school for browsing the internet and editing stuff on google docs so he doesn’t have to carry his newer laptop everyday.
I suggested Linux but I myself always used Debian and I am not sure it will run decently with such low specs. Was thinking maybe Debian 11 with xfce or something? Any better options?
A 32 bit distro will make a BIG difference with that much RAM.
Show me some numbers! ;-) … Perhaps I miss something, but basically we have 32bit pointers vs. 64bit pointers, the rest of the data should be the same size. 64bit should be faster for tasks where the CPU is the bottleneck/computations, so IMHO it will be an interesting tradeoff with no clear winner for me.