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Microsoft pushed 16GB RAM as must-have for Windows 11 for years, now sells an 8GB Surface Laptop for $1,299
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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It's not my main workstation or gaming PC, which is probably why 2GB is plenty comfortable enough.
Light web browsing, printing stuff, word processing, running presentations at my writer's group, occasionally running a Game Boy emulator or playing a video ... never anything particularly demanding. I only use it when I need the portability, because otherwise why would I want to do things hunched over a tiny laptop?
All very light uses, sure ... but for that kind of stuff, it does great. Feels responsive and snappy pretty much all the time, despite being a shitty old Chromebook from 2016.
What Distro are you using? Because I'm looking for a light weight distro that I can install on cheap laptops. I assume with 2gb it must be fairly light.
Most distros are fairly light weight by default, it’s the desktop environment that will be the deciding factor. Someone else said they were running Debian with XFCE on a 2 gig system.
There are other lightweight desktops but XFCE is quite good.
But you might not even need that unless it’s a really old or really low spec laptop. I’ve got a 2012 MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of ram running Arch with KDE plasma and it’s quite snappy. Although, it did run out of memory once when I tried compiling a browser from the AUR.
Thanks for all the info! I'll have a look into xfce.
Gallium OS with XFCE.
I'd only recommend it for chromebooks specifically, though.