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.
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.