Linux

I suggest Q4OS (with Trinity DE). It loads itself at 340 MB of RAM, so it leaves you with a lot of free RAM (especially since the heaviest apps now are browsers -- youtube needs 1 GB for itself). Arch Linux with XFCE can be made to boot at 470 MB. Debian starts at 650 MB. Ubuntu/Fedora start at over 1.5 GB so avoid.

Then of course there are the damnsmalllinux, antix etc, but the user experience on these is bad. Q4OS feels like a modern OS with GUI panels for everything, while not taking lots of ram.

Is it 32-bit? If it is, then that also severely limits your options. Personally, I just throw Debian or one of its derivatives on old hardware like that. You may want to consider Q4OS. It's Debian based and is geared specifically towards old and low-end hardware. Interestingly, it's also one of only a couple distros that ship with Trinity as a desktop environment.

Retro gaming is definitely doable with 2GB of RAM, considering that older Raspberry Pi boards can do it with just 1GB. In that case you could try Batocera.

Some other ideas include running something like Nextcloud or a media server on it on your home network. In that case, I'd again recommend Debian.

Yes, 2 gigs seem laughable compared to more recent devices but I'm still running an Acer C720 Chromebook with 2 GB RAM as my couch PC/digital typewriter. EndeavourOS plus Plasma and Librewolf (with UBlock Origin and a tab deactivation addon) provide an okay browsing experience and editing documents is rather smooth. Saving said documents may sometimes require it an extra moment to think, especially on larger files.
Even some basic image editing with GIMP and some light 2010ish video games through wine are no problem.

The CPU feels like the bigger bottleneck on my system (maybe to blame on ZRAM).

Like others have said, Debian probably isn’t a bad idea.

I feel like it would be kind of stupid to run a full-on desktop environment even though technically possible, though - I think this is a good use for IceWM.

Also, at worst, you might have a really low power server.

"How much how much RAM sir?"

"2."

My arch linux with KDE only uses 500Mb ram after boot and I have a handfull of apps in the autostart. So I would guess with some explicitly lighter desktop environment you can be well below 100Mb

If you have a chance to add an ssd or nvme you could allocate a decently sized swap partition and let the OS handle the rest.

Maybe you won't be able to watch full HD youtube in big fat chrome browser, but otherwise it should work just fine I think.

I have a similar device, made around 2013, Atom CPU, 2 gigs of RAM, 32 gig emmc drive, no exandability.

I run Arch with QTile on it without much of a problem, though as others have mentioned, web browsing would be a pain with more than a few tabs open. Youtube is a no-go too.

I currently use it mostly to test an image editing GUI im working on. I know that if it is snappy on such poor hardware it would work perfectly fine anywhere else.

any distro with lightweight wm would work. I'd try slackware with windowmaker or fvwm.

Alternatively you can try tinycore, it's supposed to be blazing fast because the whold system runs on ram.

For web browsing try seamonkey with ematrix for blocking stuff.

During 2022~2024 I used a 2008 Macbook with 5400rpm HDD, 2.5GB ram and its CPU throttled to 800mhz on Slackware15 as my primary machine and it was perfectly usable.

I have one of those at home.. I set up a samba server to store my music library and mounted it on my raspberry pi to run a navidrome server

Any Linux distribution will work, your biggest problem is your web browser. (They are fat fucking pigs) outside of that problem less than 64MB is still usable

I’m still trying to find a decently low-spec machine to run WfW 3.11 on, so, as you mentioned retro gaming, that might be an alternative.

2TiB ram is good enough if you are running ZFS but just make sure it has ECC.

I used to run Gentoo (and build it too) on an arm tablet with 1gb RAM, quite a few years ago. It was an Asus TF700T with an hardware keyboard and touch screen.

It's painful and really almost useless. You can setup the tyniest of the window manger and tools, but forget about browsing, using any office program, and probably a lot more.

With patience, it can be used i guess. Also, could be a nice command line only device with decent results.

The specific os doesn't really matter, just get one that runs a lightweight WM. Whatever you pick, make sure you enable Zswap on it to really squeeze out every bit of performance out of that ram.

Hm, 2GB RAM is a tough limitation. Even ChromeOS Flex has a minimum requirement of 4GB. I'm not saying it's impossible to find something that'll run with just 2GB, but you're probably not going to have any fun with it.
Plus, is the CPU even 64bit yet? Many distros have dropped their 32bit support already.

Assuming you mean 2GB RAM, it will run a full Linux. I was using a 2008-vintage laptop with similar specs as a secondary machine until recently, and it was capable of handling many light workloads. Retro gaming up to the 16-bit era should be fine. 720p video playback from local storage (never tried streaming) was fine. Modern websites were very hard on it, though, so I didn't normally use it in that capacity.

Just pick a distro that isn't too bloated, and a desktop environment that's suited to older machines and doesn't expect too much of the hardware, and you'll be fine.

(My laptop still works, by the way. I gave it up because 1. I got a good deal on a machine with much higher specs and 2. I run Gentoo, and compiling a modern version of GCC on a dual-core of that vintage takes longer than you would expect.)

Bunsenlab Linux I suppose, but do know if it's the single core atom version web browsing will be very slow and YT will only work in 240p after spending 10 minutes loading and you gotta use Chrome.

Mine has a Windows XP dualboot for retro gaming and Office 2007 flies on this thing. (Though it's not very compatible with newer versions of office)

Retro gaming is the best use case including ps1 emulation. I've been thinking of putting native dos on it, because some dos games are lagging in dosbox. (like imperium galactica 1 and even Prehistoric 2..)