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?

  • 0x0
    2·
    4 hours ago

    32 bit version of firefox, because it makes a huge difference in low ram devices.

    How so? What CPU does she have?

    • nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br
      2·
      2 hours ago

      I assumed a x64. Debian (the distro mx linux is based on) offers multiarch support, so i just had to enable it by running:

      sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 
sudo apt update

      Then, to install 32-bit firefox, I first uninstalled it and then installed the 32-bit version:

      sudo apt remove firefox-esr  
sudo apt install firefox-esr:i386

      With the standard 64 bit version, the browser would struggle with just 2 or 3 tabs, and with the 32 bit version, she can use like 10 tabs without problems