Linux

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.

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

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

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

So, not a

Potato ?

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.

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!

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

I bet it runs NetBSD or Tinycore flawlessly

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'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 run a rpi zero w first gen

I booted Buildroot with kernel 5.17 on a Pentium II laptop off a CD I burned once - I needed to dump a drive once and that was the only hardware I had on hand that could dump 2.5” IDE drives and had a working CD drive so I could boot something other than the operating system installed on the drive.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Is this one of those old obscenely small obscenely underpowered net books?

amazing, well done! i run Debian on cheap used Thinkcentre PCs, run as k3s worker nodes just fine.

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 think the weakest computer I’ve had Linux on was an original Xbox running DSL.

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