Linux works fine on that little RAM, but if it's an older machine, you should check out the price to upgrade. Spending $30 on 8GB would be a huge quality of lif

Linux works fine on that little RAM, but if it's an older machine, you should check out the price to upgrade. Spending $30 on 8GB would be a huge quality of life improvement. At 4gb, I'd also look at lubuntu. The UI uses less RAM than Gnome and at that amount of RAM, 1-200MB is significant (plus, LXDE uses less CPU power too). I actually run i3 on a lot of older systems to save even more (but you'll have to learn how to using tiling systems -- not hard, but something more to learn nonetheless).