System requirements

Fun fact: you don't even need a hard drive (or ssd or usb stick or any storage device) to run linux. You can just flash it directly into your firmware

You could probably get Linux to run on a decently close friendship and a stack of paper.

Comfortably runs on electronic thermometer or pregnancy test.
Linux 🤝 DOOM
- it actually did not run on the pregnancy test, just outputting on it's display. something else was computing
  
  for now

I'll take the computer on the right to the car wash and pressure wash it, then go find an air compressor to quickly dry it out.
Sure it might need a new fan and perhaps hard drive and other mechanical parts, but that looks almost totally salvageable.
Fun fact: Linux can actually run on faulty RAM, if you configure the kernel to just avoid the bad RAM regions.
- Linux doesn't actually need any functional components to run; if you put on enough pairs of programming socks and take some psychedelics you can simply sit in front of a blank screen and hallucinate a fully functional Linux distro!
  
  I don't have to; I just need to hear you described it to me. :)

be alpine linux
copy bootloader from the installer to ESP usb drive
load entire OS from bootloader to RAM
lbu commit, save changes to bootloader
378mb fully loaded to RAM
Linux. Hard disk optional.

How slow would that windows box be with the minimum specs? That seems like it would be a nightmare.
Linux on the other hand will run on anything and it's glorious!
- i have a laptop here with a gemini lake celeron n4000, 4gb ram, and 64gb emmc. it barely meets the requirements imposed by microsoft for win11.
  windows 11 on it is as horrible as you might imagine. someone brought me one very similar last week to 'fix'.. basically same model but with upgrade to 16gb ram. was not any better at all. essentially unusable, just like mine. their 'fix' was buying a new ryzen 5 laptop 12 hrs later.
- If you just let it run idle, it runs great! /s
- Fr I had a computer with those specs 15 years ago wtf are they thinking lol
- It's okay. Not particularly brilliant but it will run. I'm 80% sure that ram is the big thing that makes it feel responsive. My dad's PC runs windows 11 but is a 2nd gen i5 Sony AIO. 2c4t, an aging 5400 rpm laptop hdd, and 8 gb of ram. It's usable enough for his usecase.
  My friend has a quad core Celeron (n4020) laptop with 64 gb of emmc and 4 gb of ram. It's usable. She can play the Sims on it.
  
  An SSD will make a huge difference

I was just looking at that windows 11 list yesterday. My mother-in-law has a 7th gen i3.
She’s not eligible to get windows 11, but her computer works surprisingly quickly. Well it did after I removed 2 different antivirus programs from it.
But it’s fine for what she uses it for “Netflix”, maybe an occasional dock.
No, Microsoft, I’m not buying her a new computer for that. If ever, she’d just get an iPad.
My wife’s in favor of just letting the computer get infected if it gets infected since it’s just a Netflix machine.
I’m not here to debate whether that’s a good idea or not, but I’m here to say that this is what is going to happen for the majority of people.
I’ll probably end up putting Linux Mint on it if the WiFi card will play nice, but I expect that it will.
- It’s crazy that microsoft, a company that once had 90+ market share of the OS market and is now down in the low 70% range and falling, would rather force this shit and potentially lose people to ipads than simply just make an upgrade path for older hardware (that isn’t even that old)
  What could possibly motivate this? They have to see the folly in such a decision with all their market research and shit. Do they really have the hubris to think that people will just go out and buy new hardware en masse because they said to so they could check emails, go on social media, and do streaming shit? Tinfoil hat time: were they influenced by a three letter agency or something to include the need for secure boot and tpm? Is there an exploit or backdoor in these?
  
  I have to imagine it's because most of their money comes from business customers who rely on windows and would have to spend tons of money to switch to something else or OEMs who are making new computers anyways who this won't affect. There's a reason windows upgrades have been free for a while, I don't think they really care about getting money from people anymore, they're just after money from businesses and OEMs.
  
  That is a great question. But, I do not think so, the computer without tpm are just not encrypted at all. I think it is about collecting user data and advertising.
- Put my mother on mint. The only issue she encountered was the mouse cursor not appearing sometimes, but that hasn't happened in a while. Other than that, she can hardly tell the difference from windows 10. You should go through with it.
  
  She might get a video quality downgrade on Netflix because of DRM
  
  Yeah, I’m thinking it couldn’t be worse than windows is now. It even sometimes will drop wifi connection. So how much worse could Linux be.
  My main concern for her is how often she edits documents. Since she gets her pension, she needs to do paperwork for it occasionally, so I don’t want formatting to mess something up for her.
- Getting infected with a crypto miner is the more likely outcome for such a computer, which can be a bother
  
  Since it’s currently working, I don’t want to make any major changes because, as you know, that will be my fault when something doesn’t work as expected.
  So, once it has a problem, I’ll switch it to Linux and a crypto minter as a way to fix it.

of all that shit microsoft forces upon you..
it's the msa (online microsoft account) that's the biggest deal-breaker for me.
absolutely not. never gonna happen.
- I got doom eternal a month or so ago and haven’t gotten around to playing it. Now that I’ve tried it I realized that there’s a mandatory Bethesda account creation screen unless you don’t have an Internet connection. I’ve been turning the Wi-Fi off on my Steam Deck or pulling the ethernet on my desktop to get by that.
- FYI: You can still use windows offline and without an account if you use Pro or Enterprise and I assume education edition.

When Win11 first released, the idiot I was (or maybe still am) decided to install it on my ancient laptop because it was the newest one. It had a 6th gen i3, 4GB of memory, and 128GB storage. Didn't have TPM 2.0, so I found a workaround (forgot what it was but I did) and when I installed it, it CHUGGED.
I even installed Unity on the thing because I liked game development, and when I tried to mouse click while it was running, it took a good half a minute to register (and I somehow put up with this for like a couple years). Even without Unity, I remember the battery life being a lot worse and simple apps took ages to load.
Once I got a new laptop and learned that Linux isn't voodoo computer magic and had a usable GUI, I installed Mint on my old laptop to try it out, and it was FAST. Gone were long load times. The battery at this point had completely died so it only powers on when connected to the wall, but the laptop felt like it was new again. The screen was still garbage so I wouldn't use it as my daily driver, I much prefer my current laptop. If I ever got a new laptop, I would definitely install Linux again. (honestly I'm just not bothered to re-setup everything on Linux and backup all my data and settings and such on my current laptop, don't think I have a thumb drive large enough to back up everything)

I have Debian running on an ARM board that has 256MB RAM. Handles Audio and 720/video streaming without having to use swap.
- I'm not using swap on my work and gaming PCs > 10 years now. I first started to question I need it, when I got a new PC going from 512MB to 2GB. Now I have 20GB in one of them and I don't think I will ever be able to fill it all up until I get an upgrade again.
  
  Good for you, I have 32g and if I do too many things at once, the oom killer will stalk my tabs
- That's amazing. Mind sharing more details?
  
  Its a 2010 IOMega Home media hard drive, with OEM OS wiped off, and Debian imstalled. 32 bit armv6 board. Since it only has 256Mb the 3.12 kernel is the latest that would install, newer give errors about size, so I have it blocked from internet access. But you can see from the screen capture that once running is barely takes up 30% of that 256MB. Music streaming was my last use, previously was movie streaming using twonky until we got a 4k TV. Image is a few months back when it wasrunning openmediavault but I built a new server recently and this might just become a ups monitor or something. PS my date is wrong LOL 01 09 2025 vs 09 01 2025 I assume is what I did.

Windows 11 on 4GB of RAM? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
- I tried running it in a VM with 8GiB and it was still struggling at times

At this point run Linux in every device is already a meme.

Only win 11 home needs internet.

You can run Linux on an esp32 using using a risc-v or pdp 11 emulator.

You'd have to settle for a very primitive WM to get a Linux system to run on those specs though, let alone less. KDE and Gnome both idle at about 5GB ram.
- 5 gigs is a bit high; just checked and my Mint Cinnamon installation is idling at under 2. I used to have an old 4GB Macbook Air with Cinnamon, which ran acceptably considering its specs (and was a heck of a lot faster than MacOS).
- You get six consoles at boot. Isn't that enough for you?

ok but can you run linux on a toaster
- Of course, just make sure you paint a penguin on the side first.

This is pretty old. I had to use the way back to find it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170119082310/http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/
- 500 Error
  
  I must have forgotten to copy the archived link. I updated it.

I'm curious. I just updated to Windows 11 because I got tired of the full-screen EOL IS COIIMING PANNIICC! messages. I also just moved. I will be plugging in my PC tonight and won't have Internet until the day after tomorrow. I wonder if it'll let me do anything.
- If you upgraded an existing installation of Win 10 you should be fine, AFAIK the internet requirement is only for installing a new copy of Win 11.
  
  Yeee they removed the oobe (or whatever) skip account command which is just a script to create a reg key so you can do it yourself for now
  
  That's good to know. Thanks!

https://windowsforum.com/threads/tiny11-run-windows-11-on-just-184-mb-of-ram.348835/
- on a VM, I could boot windows from only 256MB RAM

Why have you (or whoever you got the image from) rewritten what the Windows screenshot says but in red?
- Makes it a whole lot easier to read

This is what people mean when they say Linux nerds are out of touch.
Imagine caring about these requirements in 2025.
- This is a community for Linux memes; it's not meant to be that serious. But if you do want to be serious, the fact is that a huge percentage of PCs currently in use (over half by some estimates) do not meet the Windows 11 requirements and therefore cannot upgrade. I'm sure those users care about the requirements.
  
  🤓
- Imagine being so out of touch that you cant see the torrent of ewaste this is going to create for a planet that's already on fire.
  
  Ah yeah, dude, Linux is definitely gonna be the thing that saves us from that. My bad.
- Sounds like you've only ever used desktops and/or laptops...
  
  The post is about a laptop.
- Username checks out, but troll level is weak. Try harder.
  
  Got you to reply.

Most modern Linux distros do use secure boot and TPM, but you're right that they're optional.
- Yeah the UEFI requirement is likely specifically required for secureboot/TPM as well. TPM 2.0 didnt work well with legacy boot options. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Microsoft wouldn't force those things as requirements if they didn't think they were going to be held liable in court to provide security for their users. Sure it sucks to have it "forced" but there are worse things to complain about. Like the Microsoft account requirement. Yet once again I'm sure that's because if you encrypt a drive and forget your password, being able to prove your identity and reset the password is preferred to them than saying the data is gone. Only so many "my wedding photos" and such are unrecoverable you want to deal with. Having a solution for a forgotten password is better than not. And not encrypting the drives isn't a better answer, as once again, your back to being sued. The advertisements and bloatware are what bother me much more.
  
  But it should be optional with a very clear "if you don't have this account then X could happen" warning and agreement. I don't want a ms account, and my computer shouldn't force me into it. That's my gripe with that bit.