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I know this has been explained very well in general, but I want to ask for advice on this particular situation. I hope it's not considered a duplicate.

My friend has this old netbook with only 1 GB of RAM and a 1.66 Ghz dual core. The processor is an Intel Atom N450.

I'm gonna install Lubuntu 16.04 (Or whatever flavor will perform the best.)

My friend will use it for mainly web browsing, movie watching and word processing.

We want the system to be as snappy as possible, given the old hardware.

What will perform better, 64-bit or 32-bit? Is Lubuntu indeed the best flavor?

By the way, my friend can't afford to upgrade the RAM. He is very poor with a near zero income. He's from a third world country. 20$ is like two weeks' salary for him.

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4 Answers 4

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Go for the version it is suppose to be able to hold.

Intel Atom N450 is 64-bit so I would stick to a 64-bit and match the minimum specs for any of the Ubuntu flavours. lUbuntu and xUbuntu are options. Beyond that: do consider alternatives that are around but not Ubuntu; like Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux.

Regarding:

What will perform better, 64-bit or 32-bit?

That depends on usage. 64-bit should perform better on heavy usage.

Is Lubuntu indeed the best flavor?

Probably. Or xUbuntu (that is more a preference of desktop: lxde or xfce and not about processor).

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  • That's interesting. If I install Puppy or DSL to the internal HDD, will they still run from RAM?
    – Fiksdal
    May 23, 2016 at 12:30
  • Can you clarify what you mean by heavy usage?
    – Fiksdal
    May 23, 2016 at 12:33
  • 1. yes. 2. mainly watching video and gaming.
    – Rinzwind
    May 23, 2016 at 12:52
  • I see. He won't be gaming. He will watch some videos, but mainly DVD's. And when he watches compressed formats, it's not HD. So should be fine. He's more interested in snappiness when browsing, launching apps, etc. What is the benefit (if any) of going for 32-bit? FWIW, we've already tried 32-bit Ubuntu on it. It did struggle a little bit and was a bit sluggish, but I think maybe that was because of Unity, etc?
    – Fiksdal
    May 23, 2016 at 12:56
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    None. 32-bit is on its way out. Might take a while but it will be considered a waste of resources (like Google pulling the plug on 32-bit chrome more will follow). And that will not just be due to Unity; Ubuntu is resource heavy anyways (it has more resource heavy software compared to L and X). 1Gb RAM is just not enough.
    – Rinzwind
    May 23, 2016 at 14:13
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According to your computer specification, you should use 32bit system. 64bit system can use more than 4GBs of RAM, but it's useless when you have only one. What is more, 32bit would be safer for this processor. Lubuntu is the most lightweight distribution (AFAIK), so this is also good for this computer.

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  • Yes, but it's simpler for processor to deal with 32B of data per one operation than with 64B. At least it takes less resources, although it's slower.
    – Michal Polovka
    May 23, 2016 at 12:12
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    a 32 bit OS will work, bit in the case of web browsing you'll not be able to run Chrome if that's one of your preferences
    – pfeiffep
    May 23, 2016 at 12:31
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    @Michal no, 64-bit CPUs deal with 64 bits or more at a time. Using 32-bit operations just waste the upper bits. It even deals with 128, 256 or 512 bits at a time in case of SIMD. Using 64-bit version is not useless because there are more things to x86_64 than just widening to 64-bits. quora.com/… Look at the benchmarks out there phoronix.com/…
    – phuclv
    Jan 30, 2017 at 6:25
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According to intel atom N450 supports 64bit but for performance reasons you should choose lubuntu 32 bit.

Just keep in mind that some applications support only 64bit nowadays.

  • One example is Google Chrome which has no 32 bit installer for linux anymore

    • but if you use Chromium you can still install the Adobe Flash Player for 32-bit Chromium directly from Adobe here (downloading the PPAPI .tar.gz and copying libpepflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libpepflashplayer.so or similar should work)

  • Another example is viber which also has only 64bit installer for linux.

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  • 1+ for reminding me about the Chrome issue, I had completely forgotten about that. That may be important to my friend.
    – Fiksdal
    May 23, 2016 at 12:32
  • :D you can still use chromium since most sites use html player nowadays and I read that google plans to completely block flash player in a few months (user will have to enable it for each site specific).
    – Thanos Apostolou
    May 23, 2016 at 12:36
  • Interesting. But, for the time being, a lot of video streaming websites still use flash. What major sites, except for Youtube, don't use flash?
    – Fiksdal
    May 23, 2016 at 12:37
  • I don't remember specific but I usually don't have any problems with my 32bit laptop. If some site needs flash you can still use firefox (with the old NPAPI flash version 11 which may be a little laggy but with enough security).
    – Thanos Apostolou
    May 23, 2016 at 12:46
  • Well, yeah. I'm looking forward to Flash dying :)
    – Fiksdal
    May 23, 2016 at 12:48
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This question was long ago, but my 2c.

i386 or 32-bit is more efficient with smaller memory addresses (excluding local addressing) so i386 makes better use of your limited RAM and is generally what I'd pick on releases up to 18.04; however you can't upgrade i386 so that's a plus for amd64.

i386 however can be slower to run on some amd64 cpus, so the benefit of more efficient use of memory (smaller word sizes) can be lost due to slower execution in some cases (CPU specific).

If you're going to upgrade past 18.04; I'd now use amd64; though given Lubuntu didn't support upgrading 18.04 (last LXDE release); that advantage maybe moot (but is worth something if you're using Xubuntu/Xfce).

I'd decide by what applications you'll run, will they benefit by having slightly more ram? plus your CPU; does it run amd64 faster than i386 as more modern cpus usually do. In QA-testing I find various boxes perform differently so my answer can vary on a box (ie. cpu).

The wordsize hit 32bit/4byte vs 64bits/8bytes isn't that great, is generally about equal to the performance loss of running the older i386 code vs. more native amd64 on modern cpus. On older/earlier CPUs though; the i386 generally didn't have the performance hit when compared with amd64 execution unlike more modern cpus.

This opinion is based on QA-testing Lubuntu 18.04 -> 19.04 (using i386 or 32-bit) versus the same amd64 I tended to prefer the i386 on low ram boxes, but the difference was minimal/subjectively equal and I found the difference was greatly influenced by the apps you used (some apps performed better in amd64!)

Subjectively I'd like 2GB for amd64 as a minimum; and it was all I used in QA-testing 19.10 and later (though I did keep a pentium 4 i386 box upgrading until the building of packages for i386 stopped late in the beta cycle of eoan)

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