Acer C738T-C44Z (CYAN) distro recommendations?

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1

I’m trying to figure out which one to use, as my experience with Linux is on the lower end of things. While I am eager to learn, I’m hoping for something that’s easy to use (and possibly install as well. While I’m no stranger to a terminal, most of my terminal experience is for Windows). that can fit my 16 GB of HDD space. I only plan to put Firefox (With some addons), discord (With some addons), and teamviewer on it as it’s going to be used for traveling, and while not required, touchscreen support would definitely be appreciated.

ETA: Would installing the OS to a USB drive be doable? If so, then that would widely open things up.

2

For anyone who came to this topic asking the same question, I did a few tests in a virtual machine and found out that Ultramarine Linux, despite its 20 GB system requirement, only uses up about 8 GB installed, so in theory it should work. I’ll be trying that.

3

Not really a direct comparison (and so probably not much help!), but I’m running Fedora 41 Workstation / GNOME on my old Acer C720 PEPPY (16Gb SSD and 2Gb DDR3 RAM, no touchscreen).

I’m very much a beginner when it comes to Linux, but Fedora itself was straightforward to set up from a USB stick. My main installs are Firefox for ADS-B aircraft trackers and general browsing, LibreOffice Calc / Draw / Writer, and A Photo Tool (Libre) for basic image editing.

While Firefox isn’t the snappiest, that’s probably as much down to our shonky rural broadband (a whole 3.26 Mbps today!) as anything, and it ran a lot better on another broadband while we were away last week. It does occasionally hang if I try to open too many tabs, but a “Force Quit” usually sorts that out and gets me up and running again quickly and neatly. Other than that, it all seems to work nicely and does what I want.

Good luck with Ultramarine!

4

You should be able to install on/boot from a USB stick, but you may notice some slowdown compared to running on internal storage. OK for evaluating, maybe OK for long-term use if the slowdown doesn’t bother you or is unnoticable.

Personally, I’ve been using MX-Linux (KDE) on an Acer Chromebook CB317 with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage, for a couple years, daily. Looks like MX says 6GB storage is required. But depending on what you want to use it for, you will quickly run out of space on a 16GB disk (with any OS, of course.)

If you are evaluating distros, Ventoy may be very useful. It lets you take a large(ish) USB stick and drop multiple isos on it, then boot from the stick and choose an iso to “really boot” from.

A few notes on “light Linux distros” and low-spec hardware…

If you plan to use a browser a lot, especially for YouTube or other video streaming, “light linux” will not help if the CPU/video card can’t keep up with decoding/displaying video. Not an issue for yours, probably, but on some fairly old laptops I’ve tried (not chromebooks,) YouTube is a slide show, despite the system running well otherwise. On my CB317 it’s fine. Probably yours too, but I’m just mentioning this for completeness.

You have 4GB soldered RAM, right?

If you open many tabs in a web browser, you may run out of memory. Stay on top of it, check free ram/swap frequently, close tabs and/or restart the browser before it becomes a problem.

Personally, I’m using zram swap with a factor of 150% (long story but yes you can set it higher than 100% physical ram,) and Brave set to suspend inactive tabs after 5 minutes. If I don’t pay attention I can end up over 100 tabs open, but then I’d better close about half of them, and/or restart the browser. I have had the machine “lock up” a few times (churning swap I think) when I wasn’t paying attention.

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Yeah, I have 4 GB RAM. Ended up opting to change distros because Ultramarine was giving me difficulty when trying to update software. As for what I intend to do, about 99% of it is browser and discord (and yeah, will likely be watching videos), and the remaining 1% is the occasional remote access to my regular desktop while I’m away from home. Absolutely no data will be stored on it outside of configurations for the aforementioned apps. I’ll give MX-Linux a shot as well!

6

Apologies for doubleposting-Got MX Linux working, only thing that isn’t working is touchscreen, which isn’t exactly required for me (though it’s gonna take some getting used to without it). Though if anyone does know how to fix that I wouldn’t mind hearing it.