I have had a good experience with Arch and XCFE on 4gb of ram, on a $40 ebay chromebook I use for travel. It is enough for moderate browser use, new 2D games (Celeste mostly) and old 3D games (such as Portal, Half Life 2). It didn't run as smoothly though in a previous Fedora installation with Gnome.

[–] swab148@startrek.website 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm currently daily driving a 2009 MacBook with Debian 12 XFCE, essentially on 3GBs of RAM because I've also got an Ubuntu server running for a little sysadmin course I'm doing (Linux upskill challenge if anyone's interested), and I really can't complain! If anything, the 2.4 GHz wireless card is an issue, but that just makes my downloads slow 🤷‍♂️

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

I got a really great deal on a server recently by getting a workstation from a local university surplus store with an i7 6700, and was able to fit it out with a 256gb ssd and 16gb of ram from ebay for a combined total of $70. I'm just using it for a video game server currently but I plan on possibly hosting a personal website there in the future.

It was probably a bad idea to get the drive used but it was only $15 and I'll start backing it up once I get some files on it that I actually care about.

[–] Jordan_U@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I quite happily run HAOS on my raspberry pi 3 to control the lights, my Roomba, and various other devices in my home.

Interacting with it via the home-assistant Android app, or the web interface, I'm never waiting for anything, and interacting via mosh is quite pleasant.

Part of what makes Linux nice is that you can use just what you need.

If what you need includes something like a web browser, then yes; 4 GiB of RAM is going to be a bad time, and 1 GiB is going to be unusable.

[–] cookie_sabotage@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago

I'm doing quite fine with 3.7 GiB, most of the time I barely hit 3 GiB in usage.

[–] endhits@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

I have a laptop with a very old I-5 And 4 GB. It runs mint XFCE fine, just manage your expectations.