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.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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I run a rpi zero w first gen
I ran it on an original Raspberry Pi B which has the same RAM and a slower CPU than the original Zero! It was still in use as a Pi-hole (running the DietPi OS) until recently where it seems to be dying or not keeping up.
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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!
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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?
I didnt have the intention to compete, was just proud of seeing this 2007 laptop running a modern OS again!
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.
I have been operating a DNS-232 NAS with 32 MB RAM and ARM CPU with lighty webserver for a while. It could run MoinMoinWiki, written in Python 2, acceptably. Slowest thing I have tried to work on was a 386. But this one was slow - compiling the kernel took an eternity.
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.
Nice
Celeron M with 2GB ram? That's actually not low at all :p
I bet it runs NetBSD or Tinycore flawlessly
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Is this one of those old obscenely small obscenely underpowered net books?
This one is actually obscenely underpowered but obscenely large laptop
I got you beat with my HP Mini running a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 that I use to develop games for the open source physiotherapy gamification device I made for my kid when I'm on the train.
Don't want to carry my full-size gaming laptop to work just to do some light lua coding.
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.
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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.
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My daily driver at home has the same specs. Works fine.
Do you daily drive htop or something? π
No just top. Only with swap on....π
amazing, well done! i run Debian on cheap used Thinkcentre PCs, run as k3s worker nodes just fine.
May I ask what are the specs and size of those Thinkcentres? I have one I'm using as a server and planning to upgrade the CPU because it has a dual core one, and someone offered me the same one I have, but it's pretty big. I'd prefer to use the tiny models when I can buy some :D
Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q, Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p
separate cheap newer N100 cpu node for jellyfin, other encoding
Intel NUC NUC8i5BEHS for k3s control plane, little more expensive but reliable.
i usually replace Thinkcentre fans w noctua for power draw, performance, and noise. and remove wifi module, not needed, draws power, closed blob firmware, is a risk. pops out easy, no config changes needed in Debian.
Thank you! That's really helpful for the plans I have :)
I also daily drive LMDE on a... Considerably old inspiron, but not even close to being as old as the one in my post tho π
I think the weakest computer Iβve had Linux on was an original Xbox running DSL.
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.
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Considering they just dropped i486 support this year Iβd say youβre running this on a super computer by comparison