Few years ago I had to work with an old Celeron G440 +2GB+HDD, the main problem was the applications heaviness.
For a “relative” smooth experience, I had to use stuff like Abiword, Gnumeric, Epiphany (Firefox only when necessary), Mpv and other lightweight apps.
I don’t see the point of a light distro, if you upgrade the memory and disk.
Upgrading the RAM to 8 GB and a SSD can do wonders compared to the original situation.
PS: Personally I had a good experience using SparkyLinux on very old potatoes which can’t even run Arch anymore (e.g. because they were 32 bit). It isn’t Arch, but hey mostly the didn’t need fast rolling.
like i said i have no problems with smoothness, on xfce mind you , i tried kde DE and it was sluggish as hell.
here’s some info on my system if you want to compare like
CPU:
Info: dual core model: Celeron T3500 bits: 64 type: MCP cache: L2: 1024 KiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 2095 min/max: N/A cores: 1: 2095 2: 2095
Graphics:
Device-1: Intel Mobile 4 Series Integrated Graphics driver: i915 v: kernel
Device-2: Z-Star Micro Webcam driver: uvcvideo type: USB
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.16 driver: X: loaded: modesetting
dri: crocus gpu: i915 resolution: 1: 1366x768~60Hz 2: 1366x768~60Hz
to this day I cannot use Epiphany at all websites but I have stayed in love with it a long time.
As far as the point…SSD/8GB are lipstick on a pig, the pig being weak cpu/gpu.
my thinking could be wrong, too. Won’t know til I get there. It’s an adventure that I am obviously over-thinking the sh*t out of for sure.
You can’t expect to do things you can do with a recent CPU/GPU. 
SSD+8GB will still improve the user experience.
i can add that on my little system , gaming isn’t an option lol , unless you play solitaire 
i just use it for browsing, emails, torrents, watching movies, some light editing ect. , nothing major
I had issues doing Arch the Arch way do to my dyslexia. However it wasn’t hard to do it just does take me a bit more time than the normal user so EndeavoursOS is perfect for me. Yeah I had scripts to help assist but when you get stuff backwards creating them and don’t find it until install it can be a real pita.
To be on Topic I have a Gateway that is only 1.8GHZ that I basically have set up as a radio head however I have EndeavourOS on it with XFCE right now. I did have openbox on it but wanted to play lol. I have only 16G of ram with it. The SSD is definitely a life savor as the old mech drives are slow.
I agree with this. it sure can’'t hurt. That’s why staying light is on my mind.
same here. and tetris (quadrapssel) is my game of choice :).
Glad you got a Celeron dialed in.
the reason I’m a basket case is I haven’t had a laptop since the 90’s…always a desktop so this is a whole other animal methinks
thank you for this. I am at 1.8 or 2.2 but what’s the diff I think. you have xfce on eos on an old gateway that’s a good thing
Arch + dwm/dwl is probably the lightest thing that you can get.
$ size /usr/local/bin/dwl
text data bss dec hex filename
69180 6584 496 76260 129e4 /usr/local/bin/dwl
for anyone who was following:
I received the 8GB and installed it into the laptop. Meh,
Very responsive in ways but very slow in others.
Verdict: going from 4GB to 8GB slight improvement. I will get the SSD in the mail next week so fingers crossed.
Yeah unfortunately the real difference is the CPU. The slow CPU even with an ssd isn’t going to be extra snappy or anything. Things will still be slow but you will notice a speed improvement. I would recommend also making sure to use at least a swap file as well.
no can’t help the CPU but the 8GB plus SSD I have to believe will have more zip. Swap noted, thank you. Even thought it’s a 240GB SSD I don’t feel the need for tomfoolery or dual booting and will probably donate the whole disk to the distro.
In the hunt: Sparky, Cachy, ArchBang, Alpine, Open Mandriva, and Ikey D’s Aeryn
You could also try ZRAM, this is what I use for swap, it’s not entirely the same as swap but the system will still see and list it as swap.
It compresses data stored on the RAM rather than relying on SSDs for swap (RAM is a lot faster than SSD flash). However it will use processing power to compress and decompress so it may not be the complete solution depending on the CPU but it will get more out of RAM. May not be the solution for you but just throwing another option out there.
I used this guide last November on Arch so these steps still work.
I read your 2023 thread and made notes. there was also a zswap/swap/zram thread recently I was fascinated by. In your opinion would this be a good fit for an older laptop? thank you.
My Ezarcher project has a LXDE spin that is fairly lightweight with Openbox as the WM.
I think the SSD is a good move. More RAM can’t hurt, but with 4 GB you get far. I have an old notebook here (quad-core Atom x5-Z8350, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB eMMC) and the real bottlenecks are a) the CPU, and b) the missing hardware decoding for YouTube—they seem to be using AV1 and VP9 for everything now, and the notebook can only hw-decode H.264, VP8 and HEVC. All else uses the CPU and is almost unusable.
Since I’m still using X11 almost exclusively, how about trying EOS with XFCE? In my experience, that can be rather okay on old/low-performant hardware. LXQT might also be worth a try if you’re more in the Qt world.
On above notebook I currently use Mint/Cinnamon, which is awfully slow. Since we don’t have an EOS/XFCE ISO, I gave the Mint/XFCE ISO a quick spin, and it ran circles around Cinnamon. If we now think Arch/EOS underneath, that could really be something.
I must have missed the other thread you are referring to as I don’t think I read a thread like that recently so apologies if I repeated stuff on there of what I wrote is not entirely true.
The best way to see any swap method is it’s not a way to get extra RAM (Not implying you said this, just an example) but a failsafe to prevent system freezes from memory pressure and prevent overfilling, a last resort option for this scenario to terminate processes etc.
In terms of an older laptop linux tends to run pretty well on older hardware. Depending on how lite the OS ends up being 8GB should be enough with ZRAM helping before the limit is reached as the compression is kind of giving you more usable RAM in a way. And should be the fastest method, and also reduced SSD writes for hardware wear and tear since the swap device is on the RAM. One debate is how much to allocate, but ZRAM is what I recommend at least with how I’ve used it.
zswap I don’t know was much about and never used it either or traditional swap on linux. But it seems to be a cache in the RAM, keeps what can be compressed and anything that cannot goes to on-disk swap. So it’s a bit of both rather than everything on RAM,could be better if you see yourself going over 8GB a lot but will have speed loss. zswap will also use CPU cycles in this trade off like ZRAM.
I admit my system has 64GB of RAM and originally I was going to have no swap and didn’t think much of every running out but read here that it’s best to have some regardless for efficient memory management and allocation. Currently using 120M of swap (8GB ZRAM set) with 70% RAM available.
Anyone correct me if I am wrong, while I do have my notes on this when setting up my system at the time last year maybe some of it isn’t strictly true.
thank you the reply, I understand a lot better. I am going to enable Zram on my new install. I like the idea of minimizing the wear and tear. I was also told how to trim the SSD which is a whole other topic.
Still ga-ga over Cinnamon and XFCE is OK but nothing like Cin. I’ve of many minds lately. X11 has never done me wrong either. I almost wonder if I should get an immutable distro with full Wayland so I can get a glimpse of/step into/learn the futures. Part of me wants to be bold and the other part of me does not want the headaches. I ran lxqt in eos—pretty but I had to do too much config-ing for my liking. Sorry to hear Cinnamon is s-l-o-w. Thanks for your reply.
I also generally use/suggest zram .. but some consider it to incur too much CPU overhead, and with the CPU being considered one of the main bottlenecks already … this may be worth testing in your case.
Maybe compare vs SWAP file with/without zswap enabled.