Will Puppy Linux make Google Drive go smoother my old netbook?
I'm trying to reactivate an old Intel Learning Series netbook, for educational purposes. I'd like to use it to explain my high-school pupils basics of online, multi-platform, office tools, especially google drive, docs, sheets.
It's running Lubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
The hardware specs (as listed on System data) are:
- CPU: Intel Atom CPU N455 @1.66Ghz - 1 physical processor, 1 core, 2 threads
- RAM: 10111196 KiB
- HDD: 160GB SAMSUNG HM161GI
As you might expect, it runs Google Drive quite slowly (i've been using it from Firefox)
Will it make a performance difference if I move to Puppy Linux?
I mean, using Puppy Linux would make such a task as using google drive more fluent, or will it keep it the same, due to hardware limits?
Other suggestions other than Puppy Linux are welcome!
Puppy Linux should help - but don't expect to much.
That system is very old. (it was entry level 10 years ago). It is constrained by memory, cpu and using a hard drive. I do note that it must be using a lot of swap - which is very slow - as that cpu can only handle 2 gigs of memory max - so the 10 gigs being reported must be at least 8 gigs swap, and this is a problem a lightweight distro can help with.
You will still be left with a system less powerful then a typical modern cellphone.
I had a very similarly specced netbook (Asus eeePC), until very recently. It originally had Windows 7 starter. However, while it could run Windows 10, it was awful. I put various Linux distros on it, but settled on MX Linux, a "midweight" distro. It was very slow, but acceptable for the little I used it for. I ended up upgrading it to 2GB of RAM and a SSD and it was definitely faster, but still no speed demon. Atom CPUs are just not that fast, especially on a ~10 year old netbook. Upgrading the RAM to the max and a cheap SSD will help no matter what OS you choose.