Thanks for this link!
"antiX is my top pick for truly constrained hardware. It runs on systemd-free Debian Stable, uses around 256MB at idle, and includes a full desktop experience. The trade-off is a less polished interface compared to Ubuntu-based options. If you need something even lighter, Puppy Linux runs entirely in RAM and can resurrect machines that most distros would reject. The learning curve is steeper, but the performance is unmatched."
I would actually recommend Bodhi Linux for under 2GB. https://www.bodhilinux.com/ I installed AntiX on a 2GB Chromebook, and it had issues crashing on browsers under even a couple tabs. It might have just been the laptop I bought from Goodwill, or the fact that I disabled swap, because it was an old 16GB soldered SSD/NAND drive that I wanted to avoid heavily writing swap space to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhozuNv-J7Q
Bodhi is more featured with a more conventional package manager than Puppy, and while I like booting from RAM, it's learning curve is a little steeper and less maintained than Bodhi, which is getting a new release soon: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodhilinux/comments/1qqrfyj/is_bodh...
I did a video with Bodhi on Virtual box with 1GB since I didn't have the Chromebook with me at the time, but it idles around 350MB (possibly before Chromium running): https://youtu.be/61xI-g--ozs?si=y7ukxyEGSj_kNPF7
For additional package manager support, a nice UI (Enlightenment) and compatibility, it's far more preferrable than 250MB ideling on AntiX with less support.
For Atom N450 series, I recommend eXe Linux: https://exegnulinux.net/ I have a video of that too.
I hadn't heard of BunsenLabs, but I will definitely check it out (Note: Atom N450 chips support 64 bit, even on single core, so they might work great on those machines)
It's cool to see your interest in running Linux on highly constrained systems. I might check out eXe Linux, since I spent a bit of time messing with Linux on my Cr-48 Chromebook, which has an Atom N455.
Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?
Here's my own blog post covering Arch Linux on the Cr-48: https://dansalva.to/resurrecting-a-prototype-chromebook-with...
Note that since my writing of that post, i915 graphics support in Wayland has been fixed, so it's now viable to run a Wayland DE if desired.
That's great information. I had no idea Chromebook prototypes started as early as N455, but since you're skilled with Arch, I'll recommend two distros(one isn't really a distro, but a toolkit) for your cr-48 : Tiny Core Linux, and NanoLinux. The latter is built on TCL and a distro was released on Sourcefourge around 2015- no releases since..
One could really optimize an N450 using a very light package manager over TCL, although it's possible you already have something like that on Arch. With TCL, more assembly is required.
I also used SliTaz on an EeePc 701 back in the day, and I used it more because it had out of the box wifi support. At just 30MB, quite unbeatable. The OS gets some updates still, but it's a smaller project and probably less known. I suppose you could also try Damn Small Linux 2024.
Edit: I added some notes on my tests here, and found the codec that is supported on the N450: MPEG-2: https://github.com/hatonthecat/linux_distro_tests#exegnulinu...
https://youtu.be/jMUeePXx8Ek?is=d938n8NobjBjoOlc
What makes the N450 tolerable over the Celeron 630 and even N270 is that it has hyperthreading, so it's like a dual core computer in some cases, but technically single core. It's not as fast as the AMD C-50 (with better GPU and out of order instructions, but fast enough for very light weight applications.)
Admittedly, I don't use it as a daily driver and only test it when there's a lightweight distro I want to check. Knowing i915 supports Wayland makes me want to test it again
(The AMD FX series did something like this, saying their FX 8350 was 8 cores, but it was really 2-4 physical cores and 8 logical cores): https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ngnwp7/did_the_amd_fx_... (I have an FX-8320E, and it's not super slow though-quite fast in fact)
> and it had issues crashing on browsers under even a couple tabs.
Surely this has way more to do with the browser (and the website!) than the OS, nowadays.
The memory requirements, yes. The crashing, no. The OS should not crash because memory is running out, but the solution is far from obvious or standardized. My recommendation for RAM constrained systems would be to use zswap combined with a generous amount of swap space.
true, and I think some pre-2015 machines might not have anticipated the diverse, but unpredictable ecosystem that 800 lb browsers allow under their hood these days. :)