[onesun]

A lot of Chromebooks are still shipping with 2GB of RAM and they do a perfectly sufficient job of running the "Internet" for most everyday users. I would argue your lower limit of a reasonable Internet browsing experience is higher than average because of your technical background. 512MB would be limiting for sure, but a machine with 2GB of RAM running a Linux desktop, especially with an SSD if possible, would make a fine everyday laptop.

*edit: Forgot to mention also that ad blocking aids tremendously in making the internet more usable on underpowered machines.

[yuhong]

Even Win10 still has a 32-bit version in fact.

[Nexxxeh]

For £35 you can pick up a Windows 10 32-bit tablet with wifi, Bluetooth, HDMI out, USB OTG, 1GB RAM, a MicroSD slot, 32GB eMMC, Intel Atom CPU and a year of Office 365 personal. They're excellent value for money.

[zzzcpan]

2 GB of RAM and a swap is capable of running even ubuntu x64 comfortably. Take away swap and browsing becomes a problem, I wouldn't suggest SSD because of that.

[mavhc]

Just don't use an SSD from 2004 and you'll be fine

[webwanderings]

Well, I'd argue that Internet browsing with 2GB is only suitable for reading news and email. This then is a common denominator for layman user, who then wouldn't be using Linux or Pi to begin with. However, this thread is not about Chromebook (and I agree with you there about Chromebook - my wife uses it for email/youtube browsing, and it works perfectly fine).

There's a big difference between Chromebook and Linux/Pi/etc world of hardware/software experience for any person. You can throw a Chromebook to anyone and you wouldn't have to care about it. But try imagining the idea of giving Linux type OS to anyone...we know what happens next.

This is one reason why tablets (particularly starting with iPad) became popular among average crowd.

[StavrosK]

What happens next? I've given Ubuntu laptops (2010 laptops) to my dad, mom, girlfriend and sister, and they're liking it a lot, especially the fact that they don't have to worry about malware. They're fine with it, it's not like people are born with an innate understanding of the Windows UI and are incapable of learning anything else.

[Pxtl]

Curious, for the "Ubuntu for Grandma" box, do you use the default partition plan? Because I find that stock Ubuntu has the infuriating habit of filling the boot partition with linux kernels and then freaking out unhelpfully during later updates about the lack of space.

[seanp2k2]

Run purge-old-kernels on an @reboot crontab: http://news.softpedia.com/news/here-s-how-to-remove-old-kern...

[mkesper]

Tried Ubuntu for my great-grandpa. Having to redownload 100s of MB because of prebundled DE was stupid (was coming from SuSe/KDE). Also the upgrade story was not so good at that time, switched him to Debian and never looked back.

[theandrewbailey]

For my mom, I think I set one partition for everything. I doubt an email, web, and solitare machine is going to eat a 256GB SSD over a year or so.

[StavrosK]

I do, yes, although that is a problem I have even on my machines. I just periodically clean their kernels up...

[zokula]

One can watch youtube, play browser games and browse full web sites, and watch h.264 movies with a system that has under 1GB of ram.

And your second point is almost moot since Chromebooks run on top of Gentoo Linux of all things.

[ledriveby]

ChromeOS has vetted, high quality drivers and a tightly coupled window manager layer w/fewer layers of indirection.

[wila]

Argue all you want, I do all my work and browsing in virtual machines and those usually just have between 1 and 2 Gb RAM and 1 CPU core. Works just great.