Ubuntu – Is Ubuntu 16.04 on 2GB RAM practical

Your case studies are indeed challenging.

Take your Grandpa PC

Pentium 2 and 64Mb RAM.

Lubuntu minimum requirements are 128Mb if using the alternate installer - 256Mb for the Graphical installer.

The recommended RAM is 384Mb just to run the LiveCD.

Therefore - I'm afraid, you will not be able to install a graphical environment on Grandpa PC. At best you might get a text only "server" type install via a minimal ISO - i.e. you need a minimum of 64Mb to run the minimal CD.

The "old meat":

That is more promising:

Pentium 3 with 128Mb RAM - you should be able to squeeze on Lubuntu via its alternate CD.

However the minimum requirement for Xubuntu is 256Mb with 512Mb as a recommended RAM size.

I've experimented with various "low" RAM installs. I've never tried 128Mb - but in general, I install from a minimal ISO CD and install various components manually - for example, SLIM, LXDE with apt-get install --no-install-recommends to ensure no excess packages are installed.

Typical packages you should look out for if you go this route are described in the linked question below.

Stick with a lightweight browser such as midori - abiword should be ok for wordprocessing.

Flash and general movies will struggle with your video card. However playing music should be fine (see below)

Links:

1. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
2. How do I install LXDE / Lubuntu?
3. Lightweight music player

Of all the official Ubuntu variants, Lubuntu is the most lightweight, which is to say that it uses the least CPU, RAM, and disk space.

This is followed by Xubuntu, which is less lightweight than Lubuntu but more lightweight than Ubuntu and its other official variants.

There is a saying that "you don't run an operating system, you run applications." You can further reduce (or increase) your system's resource footprint by making choices about what applications to run. For example, AbiWord will take up fewer resources than LibreOffice Writer. AbiWord and Gnumeric are installed instead of LibreOffice Writer and LibreOffice Calc, on Lubuntu.

Given your system's specifications, however, you should be able to run vanilla Ubuntu or any official Ubuntu variant. Depending on your netbook' video card, you might have to run Unity 2D (i.e., without graphics acceleration) in Ubuntu, or dial down / turn off visual effects in Kubuntu.