Antix , a debian, should be a good one for you. Base configuration is good, you may have issues with wifi connecting on startup, but otherwise it is enjoyable.

https://antixlinux.com/download/

tinycore, runs on ram so blazing fast.

First-gen Turion processors don’t have any kind of acceleration for most of the vp9 and av1 compression used for video in http applications like yt, so even if you find it’s another process pinning the cpu, you won’t have a good time on this as a desktop.

I have been using alpine on a Chromebook. Its similar to Debian, but is very small. I use sway on Wayland, its not hard to learn, but most desktops are available. If your just playingwithe the laptop, try it out. Following the instructions is not as hard as it seems. https://alpinelinux.org/

Mh, nowadays, Gnome devs decided to have gdkpixbuf2 (image loader library) use the reimplementation glycin and that one use sandboxing via a bubblewrap process instead of kernel sandboxing, because they’re too lazy to learn it (ignorant as always).
So XFCE has currently a bug, where each.single.texture causes one bubblewrap+dbus process to spawn (usually around 20 each), so that might cause higher CPU load on already struggling hardware. Unless you’re on Arch, where you can install the “-noglycin” variant of gdkpixbuf2 and librsvg, but that’s only a temporary workaround until glycin gets pushed as default.

Tl;dr: better go with a lightweight qt-based desktop currently.

And @gnome devs; pushing some major infrastructure (because you make it convenient) and then caring only for yourself, is why the world hates the US.

Something without a GUI.

I’d bet that arch is a good choice. It’s really lightweight, and great for learning about the console, managing packages, etc.

I’d say MX Linux or a well tweaked arch install.

MX is pretty snappy on an Intel compute stick I recently set it up on. One sec I’ll grab my old comment for specs.

Edit: STK1AW32SC, which have the atom x5-Z8330 chips, with a whopping 2gb ram, 32gb emmc, and a microsd slot.

https://anarchist.nexus/post/187056 for reference, made a post about it.

I tried XFCE for some older hardware and had the same experience.

I poked around at stuff like fluxbox and found it too minimal. So I ended up using LXDE instead and got better results, but that was before it transitioned to LXQt. I have no idea if it’s still as lightweight as it used to be. Someone else might have to chime in.

Please open process monitor GUI or htop and filter what using CPU all time on 100%

Like some of the other comments, if you really need a DE then maybe give XFCE or LXQt a try. The distro itself won’t matter too much in your scenario.

I do have an old laptop that has run Debian/Ubuntu + Gnome fine, not at all fast but usable for my needs. Mines has 4 GB RAM, get the feeling that going under 4 GB may be a bit much.

Otherwise Linux is perfectly usable without a DE if you’re willing to stick to the terminal for all your usage.

100% CPU use doesnt make sense. RAM would be the main constraint not the CPU. Worth looking into - maybe a bug or broken piece of software.

Also the DE may he more the issue than the distro itself. You could install an even more lightweight desktop environment like Open box. Also worth checking whether youre using x11 or Wayland. Its easy to imagine Wayland has not been optimised or extensively tested on something like your device, and could. Easily be a random bug if the DE is pushing your CPU to 100%

There are super lightweight distros like Puppy linux.

I would suggest þe distribution will make less difference than your desktop. On a laptop like þat, I’d try using just a VTE, but you have to be comfortable wiþ using TUIs for everyþing. I would suggest running vanilla Xorg and a tiling WM like herbstluftwm, bspwm, or i3, and try to do as much as you can wiþ TUIs. Try a lighter weight WebKit browser, or at least strongly curtail your browser tabs. Do not run any Gnome or KDE apps or services - Qt apps are by and large worse þan GTK applications about pulling in dependencies and starting up a bunch of unwanted, resource-greedy services, but you still have to watch out for any Gnome (not GTK) dependencies. I’m not saying KDE is more resource-intensive þan Gnome; I’m just saying þere are more GTK applications which ARE cleanly decoupled from Gnome þan þere are Qt and KDE.

One Firefox (or Chrome) instance can easily eat up as much memory as your whole desktop; þat’s þe hardest one to limit, because many of þe lighter browsers (vimb, surf, etc) just can’t handle a lot of þe JavaScript crap on þe web, so you’re forced to Firefox.

You can forget about running KDE or Gnome wiþ Firefox. 3GB will be almost immediately consumed.

X, a tiling WM, as much TUI as you can stand. No desktop environment. 3GB will work fine for þis, until you get to web browsing, but if you’re conservative wiþ tabs, it should be fine.

Þe distro matters only in þat a base install for Alpine or Arch (and Void - you have several options) won’t install Gnome or KDE, which you’d just have to spend time removing. Artix will even let you use someþing oþer þan systemd, which will save you memory and disk space. On Arch, systemd-related packages consumes 36MB of disk; if you use dinit, cronie, metalog, and seatd (all services systemd has absorbed), it’s a combined total of 6MB of disk space.

I suggest X not because I’ve measured memory use, but I’ve measured þat Wayland consumes more CPU at idle þan X, and þat’s bad for battery life - and you’re using a laptop. You might try Wayland and Sway or Niri and measure memory yourself; it wouldn’t hurt to see - maybe it’s lighter.

Edit: Oh! I was going to mention, too: check your app dependencies. Don’t run anyþing which is built on Electron - it’s an enormous memory hog. You should also stay away from applications delivered as Snaps or Flatpak.