I have a laptop with four gigabytes of RAM. I want to take it with me on vacation because its poor performance forces a certain productive austerity; no games of any kind, only one browser tab open at a time, just me and my text editor and forced zen. It runs Obsidian and syncs just fine. It runs Dropbox and syncs just fine.
maximally optimized
I did some research and Q4os has some of the best performance, surpassed only by Puppy Linux, but unlike Puppy it is a desktop environment that can run more modern software. It has its own software store with flatpack repositories; this means it does not have the ubuntu software center. HOWEVER, it is debian-based and can run any program with a debian installer. The operating system supports Discord, for example. The real test for my poor machine was Obsidian, Firefox, and Dropbox -- it does all of those perfectly well too. My poor machine can perfectly run all the composition software that I currently use and a modern web browser with extensions and bookmarks and so forth. It cannot run much else. Discord runs but it's super slow so I uninstalled it.
with nothing running:
Q4os --> uses 838 MB
Windows 11 --> uses 5.7 GB
That is 6.5 times more; it is the difference between less than a quarter of my memory, and greater than the total sum of my memory on that machine. That's the true power of this distro. It is well optimized. It takes up a fraction of the memory used by Linux Mint, for example.
The file explorer for the system is called Konquerer and it's very clunky and ugly, but it works. Terminal works fine, you can theoretically add repositories because it uses debian/dpkg.
I turned a trash laptop into a solid note taking machine.
It posesses a zen austerity. It's very appealing. Low hardware usage means longer battery life. It never got hot, it never got loud, so I suspect that having Obsidian/Focuswriter and Dropbox running doesn't max out my RAM. I don't know how much life this ancient laptop has left, but I will be able to use it as a portable note-taking and writing machine for the time being. I haven't tested the battery life. I hope to continue to use it for years to come.
This is the third laptop I have turned into a writing machine, and the weakest. My HP Envy runs Zorin Linux, I think my other crappy laptop will run Mint because it has 8 gigs. I have a very overpowered Dell laptop that I probably will not take with me on my new year's writing sabbatical just because I don't want to wind up playing video games.