I am looking for an extremely lite weight Linux distro that is pretty user friendly. I have a acer netbook that I am setting up for my brother to watch random movies and just look at facebook. I got it for free so I though it would be worth a shot. I use Antergos, but no longer seems to have support for 32-bit due to lack of use. What options do I have, I had puppy on it for a while, but I was looking for something easier to use if at all possible. I know 32-bit support is getting dropped by arch or I would just use that with xfce. I know of a few I could use, but am in no way extremely knowledgeable about Linux I just started using it in January of this year (2017).
Linux Lite checks all of your boxes. I currently have it running on an antique Athlon 64 machine with 1GB of RAM. I gobbles up 351 MB of RAM at boot, but I would expect that the 32-bit version should use a wee bit less. In all honestly, it is completely usable, but it is quite sluggish both booting and starting programs. Consider a SSD if you are the impatient type.
Here is where my head is at. I also have an old Dell netbook and every few months, I blow the latest nightly of Haiku onto the drive. Yes, it's still a work in progress and not quite ready for production. I have a spinning rust drive in this machine, but Haiku runs like greased freakin' lightning!!! They are threatening to release a beta build any time now and s far as I'm concerned, it is a perfect fit for an Atom processor. It's brilliant!
Both run everything from memory so more memory intensive than distro's using the HDD but reduces the load on the old hardware taking full advantage of memory speeds. Makes for a more usable experience.
I ran LXLE (Lubuntu respin) on an Acer Aspire netbook with an N270 CPU and it worked alright. The video would usually get out of sync on Netflix/Hulu and I would have to pause it for a bit for it to catch up. I installed 2GB RAM but never seemed to go beyond 50% RAM usage. I still use LXLE, but no longer needed that laptop and gave it to someone that could use it.
I recently installed a 32-bit Linux on a 12-year-old laptop and Ubuntu was so slow during install that it constantly stopped responding. After 15 minutes of constant "play and pause" I reset the machine and installed Debian 8 with Gnome and it's fairly smooth. However, if you need something lighter than Gnome, you can pick LXDE or XFCE during install.
How so? it updates the same as debian as far as I can tell. Support seems no different to me either. Theres tons of forum posts on their forums about this specific topic.
Recommending Kali as a daily Linux distro feels like recommending a woman looking for a purse to get a toolbox. I mean yes, it does get the job done but it's probably not ideal.
