But web browsers and video players are going to be painful with any distro.
Disonantezko
This!
Even 4GB RAM is low for web browsers and they're gonna struggle, A LOT, even with just one tab open, is going to be painfully slow to not want to use it anymore.
Old laptops like this, don't have hardware video decoders for YouTube or any video in AVC or HEVC códecs that is used everywhere today.
You can use Gnumeric for spreadsheets and Abiword for docs if Libreoffice is too slow.
- SliTaz is fun to play and very small.
- Puppy Linux is very capable and there are Debian variants.
Bad idea, they struggle with YouTube or any video because they don't have hardware decoders for AVC/HEVC.
Maybe can decode by software, something easy on CPU (MPEG1 maybe), and the conversion is done by other machine.
Maybe audio?
Reference: I have one of those Atom netbooks.
EFI didn't work for me, maybe I need LILO
Not so obscure, just 50mb and very functional, in between tiny core and puppy.
Not really obscure
- LTSC + WSL (Better than VM)
- Dual Boot
- Linux only
Or Win10 IoT LTSC till 2032
To me Adobe has very bad UI, I did try to use it, and first time was awful. Freehand was a lot more intuitive, but when Macromedia was bought, was killed.
I get it, that a lot of people did learn to use Adobe UI, and of course they want the same because they're used to, but doesn't make it better.
Affinity is more friendlier than PS to me.
I'm not saying that GIMP UI is perfect or good, but right now, to my casual use case, is not bad. Obviously can be better, and get some ideas from other UIs.
I prefer:
- ImagePipe: fast edit
- Snapseed: complex edit (not FOSS)
- Aves: gallery
- Superimage: AI upscaler (RealESRGAN)
- Waifu2x NCNN: AI upscaler (Waifu2x, RealCuGAN)
Wayland and Cosmic are not there yet for beginners, more like beta, watch videos from Brodie Robertson, I'll wait half year at least to try that for newbies.