I bought an old HP chromebook cheap on ebay that came with Zorin OS installed. It isn’t much, but just about manages to do what I need. The trouble is, Zorin seems kind of bloated and the Chromebook hasn’t got much memory. I don’t even have enough space to install updates.
I’m comfortable with running a pared-down OS that might be a better fit for a tired old Chromebook. What might work better than Zorin?
if your trying to find an OS that is low on resources, there’s only one option: alpine linux. Yes it starts out as a TTY (no graphical environment) but they do have scripts to install the OS and a graphics environment of your choice.
the one concern is driver support, generally (unless using a popular distro such as zorin OS) driver support for Chromebooks are limited. I’ve tried getting alpine Linux on my Chromebook and can’t because the wifi card would not work for it.
that said, if you’re ready to manually configure driver support for it (which most likely will happen) the artix OS uses about 128 MB of memory. That said, if you have more, Linux will dynamically allocate more for core OS functionality