this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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I have an Acer Aspire One (very low spec mini laptop from ~2010) with 2GB of ram; it runs modern linux distros with xfce with better performance than it had running Windows 7 when it was new (which is what it came pre-installed with). Doesn't run much modern software obviously but it does work for web browsing (firefox). It's noticeably slow, but it always was.
About the same, I have an old netbook HP Mini 311 with an Atom 270 or something, it came with 1GB of RAM and winXP, I installed another 2GB to have 3GB, worked fine, then installed MX Linux with Xfce, even the nvidia GPU was working fine in it.
For fun I tried to install win10Pro, it worked!!! was basically unusable, but it booted to the desktop.
Yeah, though last I looked, Xfce was still really X11-only, so unless that's changed, I'm assuming that you're running X11. A lot of my unknown here is "how does a Wayland-based system operate under low memory environments", because that
well, and systemd, but I'd bet that systemd is less memory-critical
is probably the largest chunk of the system that got replaced in recent years.
searches
It sounds like it's working in very preliminary form, but they've got a ways to go:
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap