I've just been given a beautiful turd of a PC with only 512MB RAM to get ready for someone in the residence. Way too small for any modern Windows or even Linux with a halfway decent GUI. And the user doesn't have any technical background so I highly doubt that they'll be able to maintain a Linux system. Windows XP is full of security issues but it might just be able to run on that craptop. Due to me knowing that it's a vulnerable system though, I've got an ethical issue with that. Windows XP is insecure but at least the user would be able to use it.. and Linux is secure but it'd never get updated, and I really don't want that guy to come knock on my door every time he wants to install a piece of software.. the guy fucking stinks! What would you do in a situation like that?

Ubuntu should be alright on that sort of hardware? (As much as I hate suggesting Ubuntu for this sort of thing)

Just do the minimal install and all should be well?

Present him his options and let him decide

@lxmcf Lubuntu or Xubuntu maybe, but that on its own already consumes half of the available RAM. Not much available for web browsing and things like that :/
@JKyll Good idea.. guess I'll have a knock on his apartment and endure the smell... The fucker'd better pay!! The things I do just for that filthy money... ._.

@Condor: Windows XP is quite old that many exploits don't work on it anymore.

If you still have doubts, I found a Linux flavour called "Puppylinux" when I was looking for a very light distro. Maybe it could be of use to you.

@Qaldim puppy is not reliable enough nor ir has decent software. It's good as 'linux', but that's about it.

OP, I second xubuntu. Or mint with xfce. Or even centos. With xfce. I used to run mint xfce on 1G w/o any problems. .5G might be a challenge though... Hence the reference to centos.

I think there's still a windows xp embedded version which will get supported until 2021, so that might help out.

Lots of program does not even run on XP anymore. It is still a door knocking festival....
better pc. 200-300 euros , used. Refurbished. Whatever, just let him be autonomous

Tell me which modules, and I could look if I have something to extend that a bit (:

@mngr Turns out that he can't afford it.. maybe I'll see if I can put one of my 2GB sticks in there. Lack of Windows XP support is indeed a pain. But apparently the use case will be just some Facebook games. So I can probably get away with a small Linux distro like DSL or SliTaz or whatever and just install Midori on it, then lock the whole thing down and put a weekly or so updater in cron.

@netikras Thanks for the suggestions! Xfce may be a bit too much though, given that a web browser needs to run on top of it. Perhaps Openbox would be a good alternative? It's been a while since I last used that on my now defunct evilbox flash drive (an evil Arch essentially) but it's been pretty snappy, even on a USB 2.0 link.. so I guess that it won't be too heavy on RAM either. Puppy may still be an option by the way.. I mean if it's just Midori on top of it anyway, I guess that I can compile that from source.

@xewl I can't open the PC right now (dd-ing the hard drive empty before installing something new which will take a few more hours.. i.e. till tomorrow cuz I'm super tired) but I'll keep you updated. Here I've still got some 2GB LPDDR3 sticks that'll hopefully fit.. but not sure. This thing seems like it's from 20 years ago, so it wouldn't surprise me if it's using DDR2 or even first-gen DDR memory.

elementary
https://elementary.io/

When in doubt, and the computer is only used for surfing, how about DSL (Damn Small Linux)

However I guess Ubuntu or Debian could work too

The stinking guy got me hahaha

MS-DOS

@Condor openbox, fluxbox - sure! They are much more lightweight than alternatives. But xfce gives way better ux in exchange for a lil more memory. It [at least] used to be lightweight

@Condor I only reckon having ddr2 sticks in sodimm atm tho

@Condor I use lubuntu on a 10 year old Celeron netbook, it should be enough. If he wants XP let him shoot himself on the foot.

@Condor

Xubuntu that jive

how about ubuntu with fluxbox or enlightement ? just make shure that his box has all kinds of autoupdates and a minimalistic gui to manually install downloaded packages (cant remember the name of said package)

OpenBSD with dwm or use a minimal distro with openbox.

I thought I'm the ruler of potato laptops. Shit I got beaten.

From your info, I don't think lubuntu or xubutu and the likes will be an issue for the hardware.

Playing FB games on browser is the issue. Will have problem even on Midori.

@SauceBoss Sounds like a good idea, but even 32-bit Win7 seems to require 1GB of RAM minimum.. and the browser will likely have to take up some 300-400MB as well, leaving only 100-ish MB for kernel, init and compositing / window manager. I doubt that any kind of Windows that hasn't reached EOL yet will be possible to run on this machine. Luckily its target user isn't expected to install anything new on it, so .exe support isn't required and locking down the system would apparently be preferred (and, well, I would too, I don't want that guy to come knocking at my door every other day). So probably I can get away with some kind of Linux and just lock it down so that he can't fuck it up.

@capj Probably I'll go with some lightweight distro with OpenBox yes. BSD on the other hand I'm not very familiar with yet myself.. that being said, I am gleaning over it every now and then to see whether I really shouldn't try it out once. But being able to ship a decent BSD setup is definitely not something that I'd be confident about yet. Linux on the other hand.. I mean, I've ran a 13MB RAM Linux system before (that nonetheless worked!) so this should be possible. Just that for €20 I really don't want to spend too much time on it.

@cursee Facecunts are the leaders of the featureful Web 2.0 movement indeed :') 30 seconds just to load a page? Batshit insane. Hopefully the target user will be able to keep up with it better than impatient me can, haha.

@Conder Excellent. If you already know the basics of the Linux, go for it. I strongly advise to take a crude distro (you seems to know what you doing, btw) + lightweight wm and everything will be alright.

OpenBSD is very easy to install and very stable in old hardware, btw, it's insanely lightweight from the start.

Good luck.

@SauceBoss I think, I should have an iso laying around somewhere... Including a key that I have for friends/relatives but never used so far, so not sure what the licence agreement is but again I don't think I'll need it in the near future.

@24th-Dragon chromium os

@Wack If possible, could you host it somewhere? I'd be happy to seed it in my Transmission server. As for the license key.. I presume that the Daz loader is compatible with this, of which I've got a copy. Perhaps I'll host that one as well, but for that I'll probably have to configure my Transmission server to use anonymization services like Tor first.

@Condor could you contact me on riot (or any other way)? Under swiss IP protect law I'm allowed to share it with friends and familly but not every one (a.k.a. the internet)

@Wack I'm not on Riot but feel free to contact me at (your or my username, at your preference)@nixmagic.com. That way it should end up in my private inbox (it's a catch-all so anything should do).

@Condor an image with tinycore could be the solution?
http://www.tinycorelinux.net

Firefox seems to be in their repos too: http://repo.tinycorelinux.net/6.x/...

Bunsenlabs!