Linux

I think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.

I wouldn't want to try it today though.

2GB of RAM? Low?

Were you born after the year 2000?

2 gigs of ram ? You probably can have an emulation station up to PS1 with this hardware.

So, not a

Potato ?

I rushed to the comments when I saw a 1.6ghz CPU being called low end but I see OPs already been dealt with. I remember the first ever 1ghz CPU being an overclocked nitrogen cooled AMD Athlon. Me and my mates were all talking about it when it happened.

Whilst the Celeron was indeed utter cack, 2 GB has me making four Yorkshiremen-style "2GB? Luxury!" style comments.

I used to run Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire 1362 WMLi back in 2005. I had 512 MB of RAM and a 2800+ Sempron processor.

That said, looking at this:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1351vs710/Mobile-AMD-Sempron-2800+-vs-Intel-Celeron-M-1.60GHz

My old Sempron was a better CPU than that piece of junk Celeron you've got there. Giving it 2GB of RAM is hilarious!

Hell yeah! Love seeing old hardware like this still running a modern OS.

With Linux, if your hardware is a decade old, you've barely even reached middle-age.

Meanwhile Windows 11 won't even allow an official install on hardware that's 4-5 years old.

Long live Linux & FOSS ✊

Celeron M with 2GB ram? That's actually not low at all :p

I bet it runs NetBSD or Tinycore flawlessly

thats my current laptop

Edit: im exagerating but I really have 20-yr 32-bit Dell laptops running minimal debian linux. and my current laptop is 10+ yrs old Lenovo which I already replaced its screen, rams, keyboard, bluetooth, usb ports... and it's still working flawlessly for daily tasks, video/music editing, coding and programming, internet browsing :D

I’m pretty certain the first computer I installed Linux on was a Pentium 75 with 4MB of RAM. I know I ran it on some 486s booting off floppys at work. We were at 10,000 feet and couldn’t trust the lifespan of spinning rust.

I've run Linux on a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM. There's not much modern software that will run on that hardware though.

Are you using systemd? Because 317 MB of RAM is really low for a normal Debian installation with XFce. At my mom's 2 GB ram laptop, it uses 850 MB on a cold boot.

I suspect my first Linux ran on an 80mhz AMD K6. I did however also run it on a retired dual core UltraSPARC some years later I had somehow gotten my hands on. It might have been faster, but at that time it sure felt slow. And it sounded like a train passing through when it was on. In retrospect installing Gentoo on it was an optimistic endeavour.

I had slackware on my 386DX 40. 4mb ram. It was kinda short-lived. I never got my modem working. I got a book, paged thought it. Learning shit was hard in the 90's Internet.

itautec

reproduto(...)

points Brazilian

My 2011 MacBook pro is still chugging along thanks to Linux.

I upgraded 4GB RAM to 16GB, upgraded the HDD to SSD, and replaced the CD drive with a second SSD. Sadly the screen is almost completely gone, occasionally intermittent, probably a cable gone bad, not sure, but the mini display port is working fine for an external monitor.

If Minix counts, I got it running on a 286 some years ago. I don't remember how much RAM it had, but it was very little.

Ran an ISP on a Pentium 90 and a few 486s. Linux and FreeBSD!

Stories from the "good" old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it's still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.

Of course, it won't be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.

I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.

I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it's the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I'm working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine's CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).

If you're willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.

My daily driver at home has the same specs. Works fine.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/linux-to-end-support-for-1989s-hottest-chip-the-486-with-next-release/

Considering they just dropped i486 support this year I’d say you’re running this on a super computer by comparison

Ran Ubuntu 8 with Compiz and integrated graphics on a Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM. It was an awful machine, but Linux made it great to use. I still miss the peak of GTK2 + Emerald.

I’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century

I think it was born in the 21st century? From this it looks like the first Celeron M was in 2004, and the first at that clockspeed was 2005.

Also, 2GB of RAM is plenty for many purposes - that's more than any Raspberry Pi before the Pi 4 had!

Are we competing again?

I'm proud to be setting up a rhel10 desktop, as it'll be the first time I ran Linux as a desktop in 30 years of a Linux/Unix career.

To rephrase: I ran XFree86 on a 4mb i386 machine 30 years ago.

What do I win?

[ laughs in NetBSD ]

Those are better specs than what I used throughout college (an Asus Eee PC running Debian with Xfce and Openbox). Not a powerful machine, but I absolutely loved that thing.

I run a rpi zero w first gen

Up 'til 2022 or 2023 company I work for used Pentium 4 at POS PCs running ancient openSUSE. They would be still in service if it weren't for leaking/swollen caps on most motherboards. Pure power wasn't really there, but it was plenty enough to run that checkout software...

Yes the laptop CPU and RAM may be upgradeable but have you considered the parts availability? Considering its a 32bit CPU

https://shop.hak5.org/products/shark-jack technically runs openwrt.

SoC: 580MHz MediaTek MT7628 mips CPU


Memory: 64 MB DDR2 RAM, 64 MB SPI Flash