This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Wow. I'm impressed... Loads of comments and no one had to chime in and say "Arch is the best" π
Arch is as lightweight or heavy as you want it to be. Except for the Systemd stack, that locks you a bit in. That's where Artix comes into play.
You are all falling for the rage bait
Yup
Same for you.
Neither have ever been lightweight.
More like Ubuntu was the beginner friendly distro and Mint has taken that place years ago, right?
Maybe Xubuntu or preferably Lubuntu, but never Ubuntu.
I'd even have a hard time saying Linux Mint is going to be lightweight.
Lubuntu definitely seems about the lightest weight desktop environment for it for sure. I suppose Ubuntu server can be pretty light... But so are most linux servers, that's kind of their selling point.
I'd argue AntiX or PuppyLinux... but if we're talking about stuff a normie can just use, I agree with you.
DietPi (headless) is ~ 300mb fully resident in memory.
You can tell the author hasnβt spent much time in the Linux world.
Unless they're comparing to LMDE, they're mostly similar about being lightweight.
Ubuntu was never a lightweight distro lol
I mainly use Mint as my desktop distro, but itβs not lightweight, itβs batteries included. If lightweight is what you want, there are better options.
I use xubuntu just because I like xfce better
π
Ubuntu used to be even more demanding with Unity. I love Mint though. Been installing it a lot lately
Nope. Ubuntu is a lightweight distro. If one wants to call it a Linux at all. I freshly installed Kubuntu 26.04 a few days ago "with everything", but that did not even include a gcc.
Not light weight. Also not Ubuntu.
Any Linux distribution based on KDE or GNOME is not going to be lightweight. It did have the LXDE option for stripping it back somewhat, but the repos were still mostly filled with software that requires KDE or GNOME.
Mint is kind of like LxUbuntu back in the early days; still no lightweight, not even by desktop standards, but itβll bloat up quickly if you want to get anything done with it.
I mean, Puppy Linux and DSL are still around. Anything based on Debian could claim to be stable or enterprise ready, but not lightweight.
I feel like this was true maybe 10-20 years ago, but any semi-recent desktop or laptop can run KDE or Gnome fine. If you are running an SBC with limited RAM, then maybe you should look at another desktop GUI.
Any semi-recent desktop or laptop has no need of a lightweight Linux. Thatβs for embedded solutions, rPis, and other resource constrained systems.
Having said that, in 2026 and going forward, we may have need of lightweight desktop distributions again. 64GB storage, 4GB RAM style.
