Friend has an old laptop with windows 10 that he doesn’t use because too slow and freezing all the time. Wants to revive it to leave at his lab in grad school for browsing the internet and editing stuff on google docs so he doesn’t have to carry his newer laptop everyday.
I suggested Linux but I myself always used Debian and I am not sure it will run decently with such low specs. Was thinking maybe Debian 11 with xfce or something? Any better options?
Why wouldn’t Debian run?
Debian is the OS, with its package manager and some applications suggested by default. You can install Debian with X, without X, with a certain window manager or another, etc. So… Debian WILL 100% run, the question rather is WHICH software should you pick that gives the best compromise between ease of use (specific to that person) AND performance (specific to that computer).
PS: to be clear, that’s the same for other distributions. There are distributions that specifically target older hardware and that in turn might facilitate the process but usually if you do check how such distributions are done, they are basically Debian (or NixOS or Alpine or whatever) with a specific package selection. It’s rare (if ever? counter-example) to have anything special that would somehow “boost” performance for hardware, especially here when it’s rather common hardware.
FWIW I did run on old hardware with ratpoison and had a blazing fast experience, much more responsive than “top” hardware back then. So… yes IMHO it’s about the wm/de usually, the rest follows. Obviously you can’t run super demanding software, e.g. video editing, 3D modeling, etc but that’s usually rather obvious.