Specs:
- Intel i5-9300H 4c 8t @4.10 GHz
- GTX 1650 Mobile Max Q
- 8 gb DDR4
Preferably something barebones and without a desktop environment due to my little available ram. Something built for remote access with moonlight.
I am currently using a minimal fedora setup with standalone KWin (without plasma) and Pegasus launcher but it is kind of holding together with duct tape.
I am open to running debloated windows too, I tried Tiny11 for that purpose but it was painful to use. I gave up while installing the bajillions of drivers.
I might also cook up my own arch install script but that seems like a lot of effort i don’t want to go through
Just see if you can tolerate Debian and lxqt before you start doing weird stuff.
What kind of weird mutant laptop is this? You may have more and cheaper upgrade options available than you think…
E: I found a couple of laptops that ship with that processor and gpu and they all seem to have two ram slots and ship one stick of ram in the 8gb configuration. A ram upgrade in that case would be $30 or so. Even if you needed to swap two sticks it would only be $50 to go to 16gb and help you a lot.
The ones I saw all had an nvme slot and a sata port with an ssd installed in one of em. I have had great luck speeding up slow ssds with spinrite running its level 3. I’ll spare you the explanation but it really works.
I feel like, as you already mentioned, a headless arch install sounds the closest to what you want.
I’m not sure why you need to write your own install script. What’s wrong with the normal Arch install script? I’ve never used it myself, actually.
When I first installed arch, I wrote down each step in the tutorial video I watched into a set of discrete steps. I now have that .odt saved and can pull it up again whenever needed, so reinstalling arch isn’t as daunting as it was for me originally, but I still have the flexibility of doing everything manually and understanding why I am doing each step.
Maybe MX Linux with Fluxbox?
Be sure to allocate plenty of swap space



