Lightweight Linux Desktop Distro

S

shadow_man

Executive Member
Joined
May 27, 2005
Messages
7,025
Reaction score
1,745
Location
Cape Town
Hi,

Anyone got a lightweight Linux distro they can recommend?

Basically I'm looking for something that runs with as little RAM as possible.

I'll only be using it to run Skype as Skype in OSX is buggy (on a corporate proxy it repeatedly locks my AD account, but on Linux or Windows it doesn't).

Thanks,
 
antiX

It is by far the lightest distro I have ever used, and the support from the antiX and MEPIS community is beyond anything I have experienced.
 
Thanks guys,

How do these compare to something like Puppy or say a light weight Arch install?
 
Just make sure your distro supports your webcam, mic etc. Most should, but the more obscure distros sometimes have compatibility issues. Easy enough to test tho, most should run Live from a CD or USB.
Also, even heavy distros are gonna use max 1GB ram probably (as you can see in the graph), esp if you tweak them. So how limited are you? Are you running on old hardware, or in a VM maybe, that you need as little as possible?

What I'm saying is, you may be over-complicating your life. My suggestion is to install what you're most familiar with, then check if the RAM usage is low enough. If not, then start looking around for other options.
 
jsheed_sa said:
Thanks guys,

How do these compare to something like Puppy or say a light weight Arch install?
Click to expand...

Have tried many light distros on my ageing Atom N270 based netbook and finally settled on Lubuntu 15.10. It uses around 110MB of RAM when idle and all hardware was detected and work as expected, which was not always the case with a few other distros I tried. Lubuntu was much quicker to install than Arch, and very stable compared to Puppy, which crashed a few times when I tried it...
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X