Does anyone know any lightweight Ubuntu based disto that uses’ less than 500Mb ram ?
Debian, if you flip around the “based on” requirement.
Besides, what uses significant amounts of RAM is not “the distro” but the primarily the window manager, some daemons and little more. You can try LXDE as a window manager. Good luck with browsers tho.
Maybe Xubuntu
This is mostly a factor of the desktop environment used. The following should help you decide how to proceed:
That 26mb Trisquel Mini minimum ram requirement has got to be a typo. Still, 256 mb (more likely) is still very impressive.
I’m inclined to agree about the typo, but then again, Tiny Core Linux only needs 16MB and comes with a FLTK/FLWM desktop. It’s not exactly feature rich, but still a functional desktop.
Edit: the LXDE website seems to suggest at least 256MB as well.
Kind of. I’ve been running Xbuntu for four years on a system with 1 gb ram total. Running XFCE, I’m using a little over 500mb of ram at idle. I could probably optimize that. If I switch to i3, I use around somewhere between 300 and 350mb of ram at idle.
Another option: Check out Ubuntu Core if you’re shooting for super-tiny and you are willing to use snaps instead of deb packages… It targets embedded systems, so it is designed to run on 250/500mb of ram depending on which version you pick. I’ve used it on a Pi before and their website indicates that it works on other architectures. It isn’t meant to offer a desktop experience.
