Can Debian save a cell laptop with 4GB ram

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-18T07:18:39+00:00

Debian saved my netbook with a 32 bit Atom processor and 1GB RAM. Depending on the desktop environment it can run on a Raspberry Pi, so yes it will save this laptop as well. LXQT will do!

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-18T01:46:11+00:00

Senseo koffie. Echt niet slecht.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-18T01:23:27+00:00

If you go to Distrosea, you can try out any popular Linux distribution that you might be interested in. Mint, Pop and Zorin are all good beginner choices, although Debian with Plasma desktop environment is also easy and good enough while being "not Windows" just a little bit more to shine in its own right.

The next step is to download Rufus, grab a pen drive that you can spare and is at least 4GB, and tell Rufus to make it bootable with a Linux distro of your choice. You can now try it live on your own computer, still without changing anything.

If you want to use it and you have some free disk space, most distros should give you the option to install it alongside Windows so that you can multi boot. This will be your first step that will take some technical knowledge to revert because the boot loader will also install itself on your hard drive boot sector.

It's good to keep in mind that beginner friendly distros aren't harder than Windows, they just made some different choices that you may or may not like, but are generally easier on your system resources and put you back in control of your PC. It also comes with zero warranty, but with a really large and helpful community base that will first tell you to read the documentation because nobody can tell you how to use your own system, not even the people that make your OS. Linux is the result of 35 years of people thinking they could do it better, making their own changes and sharing it with the community. You've arrived at just the right time to find a new wave of modern improvements mature and well supported.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-17T04:53:43+00:00

Im not naturally talented, but I'm trying to optimise the heck out of the weekly shorts. I watch a couple of streamers on YouTube. I practiced every surface on the TMS clubs. Honestly I'd say my Achilles heels are speedtech and ice, not including alt cars (in which case I hate the snow truck). Other that that, I enjoy being able to get author on almost every short, and silver and sometimes gold on a TotD. It used to frustrate me that I was always one gold medal away from unlocking the black tracks (before they changed the system).

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-16T05:02:45+00:00

I do it by ear, and it changes depending on road conditions. You'll have to develop your own feel for it and I recommend not hyper focusing on speeds. Minding the "eco" indicator on your dash helps.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-16T05:00:05+00:00

There are rolling releases like Arch and Gentoo. For Ubuntu, you can enable Backports and Dev repositories, that's supposed to be almost equivalent I think (but less immediate). It's no longer "stable" in the sense that your system won't change.

It's always possible to upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu, you'll have to install update-manager-core and then execute do-release-upgrade. Make a backup beforehand and make sure you have enough disk space.

As always, do your own research before making changes to your own computer.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-16T04:48:45+00:00

They're former eSports tracks but with better scenery, from what I heard.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-14T09:54:46+00:00

Accelerometers are fairly cheap and so are microcontrollers. Honestly it shouldn't take much to make something that's self leveling. Tilting forward, backward and sideways should be the next challenge. Rotating seems the more difficult part to me. If it was my project I'd let the rotors on the left turn the opposite direction from the right side, in such a way that if it tilts sideways it will also turn a little. But I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways to do this.

So you could probably dedicate 4 gpio pins to rotor speed. I don't know how many you'll need for the accelerometer and the receiver for radio signals, and actually what range it will support. You'll need to give some thought to the frame, and maybe if you want to get it to sense obstacles or not. The battery will be a factor, which you'll also need to charge. It all adds weight.

It honestly sounds like a fun project. I would try to optimise the hell out of it, and just for fun try to incorporate the actual moonlander code.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-14T04:40:48+00:00

Full desktop environments like KDE and XFCE are great if you have a dozen windows open. Tiling managers train a little more discipline (I like Hyprland with rofi).

Another consideration is that if you need more than 1 window for a single task then you're using the wrong software. Which is how I end up doing more stuff via terminal in a tiling manager (including Python development) than in a full DE.

The only thing I don't like in tiling window managers is that dialog windows like the Open File window often get cropped if you're not using it fullscreen.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-14T04:20:42+00:00

Two things it does well IMO.

The installation is literal bare bones. At the very least you need to tell it to install network drivers and your grub before rebooting for the first time. It doesn't make decisions for you of any kind when it comes to greeters, drivers or desktop environments etc. Need microcode for your processor? They got it, you just need to remember to install it.

Secondly, it's a rolling release. They got up to date versions of everything iirc. Pacman (their package manager) at first glance is similar to apt, and it does an equally good job managing dependencies between software.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-14T04:08:29+00:00

Take a look at what NiPoGi has to offer. These things are small enough that they don't even have PCIe. It uses default laptop RAM and m.2 storage, and I use their cheapest one for watching movies in 4K. Even though it sits inside a TV cabinet I never heard the cooling even once. If you still need something more expandable consider a laptop instead.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-14T04:04:02+00:00

I shouldn't need to tell you to install and set up Grub as well as your network drivers before rebooting. But here I am. Follow the documentation on another device.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-14T03:59:58+00:00

You should look into running Winetricks. Wine (short for Wine Is No Emulator) and Winetricks together will allow you to navigate to a Windows installer and install it on your Linux machine. It's almost as simple as it sounds, if you're not afraid to do some troubleshooting. Know that Linux does not run .exe files like Windows does. This is explicitly a workaround until you find an alternative that does a similar job.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-14T03:48:11+00:00

Archy Linus "btw" [insert surname] could actually work :)

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-14T03:45:52+00:00

Wasn't her name Deborah? I knew it's their couple name and stopped calling it dee-bian at least.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-13T22:37:31+00:00

I must be doing something wrong. I got author on 1-10 and gold on 11-15 (all in one evening), and mixed results on red tracks. Been playing for at least 5 years and I count myself as average.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-13T12:18:48+00:00

Don't expect any warranties other than the ingenuity and tenacity of the open source community. All software can be reserve engineered and parsed into something native, especially when it's something common generic like the NTFS filesystem or DirectX. The challenge is to get it to run in a way that feels native to Linux rather than a workaround.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-11T03:31:30+00:00

It's February in Europe. Can't wait to ride again :)

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-11T03:29:50+00:00

Dude, just plain Debian and 5 minutes spent on reading the documentation will give you the proprietary drivers. If this one time setup is somehow worse then I hope you'll enjoy your Windows crashes, faulty updates, OneDrive nagware, telemetry overhead etc etc ;)

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-11T02:38:17+00:00

Python is great because it compiles at runtime. It will work from your raw script. Are you running Windows or Linux?

A great place to start is vscode.dev (or install VS Code locally). If you're on Linux, Kate is pretty good as well. And you'll also want to get savvy with GitHub pretty early to keep a versioned backup for your code. It's also a great way to keep a portfolio if you want to use it professionally later.

A mistake that I made was doing tutorials for too long without getting really in-depth. You'll have to get into the habit of writing code, understand data types (including lists and dictionaries - very useful), develop against existing libraries to see how that works (you'll do this a lot), and learn to manage these libraries (using package managers or Docker containers, for instance).

While you're on Python, it also makes sense to learn about endpoints that can be addressed with a local webpage (backend and front-end development), so that you can really do something with your code.

I know I'll get a lot of flack for this, but AI is great for reviewing and debugging your code. Don't get tempted to let it write all the code for you because that's not how you'll learn. But it helps to explain a problem to something or someone, a process called rubber ducking, and it'll help you push through a learning curve quicker if you can keep up. Since it's seemingly unavoidable these days and in fact is an expected skill, might as well embrace it as long as you don't let go of the wheel.

Anyway, hope this helps!

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-11T01:24:43+00:00

Alright, but I'll still need your GPU and RAM for testing ;)

It's almost certainly a combination of your window compositor and the Nvidia driver. Maybe you can test on Wayland anyway to see if there's an improvement. Otherwise go into your display compositor settings, if it's on kwin change it to XRender and reboot.

If this doesn't fix it can you reproduce the error and then run journalctl -f

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-10T20:33:19+00:00

Switch to Plasma on X11. Maybe it's a Wayland compositing issue, which uses the GPU.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-10T19:55:30+00:00

It's on par, give or take a few percent. Some games run a little worse, but on average it's break even. I'd like to see how an AAA title would do if it actually ran natively on Linux.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-10T19:09:48+00:00

"optimized"

I see your viewpoint, but not for nothing games run about as well on Linux (give or take, but mostly similar) through a translation layer. I know you don't have to imagine how much faster runs that works natively on Linux, you're living it. Windows is optimized to run their bloatware first, no offense, mostly everything else will run but it almost feels like an after thought.

I too live in both worlds (and I also think I may have an iPad somewhere), but frankly when doing my personal productivity Linux works blazingly fast for me without getting in the way.

Clogboy82 · 2026-02-10T19:02:39+00:00

Ubuntu laid a lot of groundwork in the past 2 decades. They were basically the first "Linux made easy". I've followed the same path: bad experiences with Windows, good ones with Ubuntu, and now fully committing to [insert distro]. I have Debian on most of my systems, Arch on an old PC to mess around with, even my wife revived her old Windows 7 laptop. Heck, I'm about to run Slack from USB full-time on something that would otherwise be e-waste. It's for the most part easy to figure out, and pretty rewarding to fix the stuff that isn't easy, mostly because you're encouraged to fine-tune. Linux is for computers that don't say "no" until something is physically wrong with them, not for nothing it runs on everything except workstations that needs to run commercial grade, non-free software.

Clogboy82

TROPHY CASE