I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it’s running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
SSD upgrade
This will be the single biggest change you can make. Swapping an hdd for a cheap 256gb ssd will make a bigger difference than any DE changes.
And then ZRAM and swap like hell
Won’t that kill the SSD on short notice? Or can they make do with it for years?
I mean, worth the tradeoff? Zram would just make the cpu work more. Swap… kill the ssd
But over time. SSDs can handle a lot, like a couple of years?
Not really, if you would spend a lot more on SDD drives instead of getting a modern computer
Won’t be a couple of years if you’re constantly swapping, no.
I thought it’s either swap or ZRAM - could you use both at the same time?
Yes Fedora uses swap and zram by default. Just compresses the memory in RAM (more memory available) and on disk (less data written, less wear)
Wow, that’s supercool actually! I had no idea…