I don't know if this is the right place to ask. I have an old IBM X31 which I used as my Astronomy laptop. I kindly like to ask if you think this computer could be up to the task of running INDi, ekos, and kstars for astrophotography? I though maybe a SSD could help but otherwise I am pretty much at the limit of the laptop already, i.e. 2 GB RAM max. Processor is Pentium M, 1, 6 GHz.
Would you recommend archlinux as an low weight distribution and install a minimum KDE environment?
In general this will work. INDI itself doesn't need much power, the small Raspberry Pi with 700MHz/512MB RAM is enough for most cases. I don't know how minimal a KDE can be, but for a "normal" KDE setup the CPU might be a little bit too slow. I used an old Netbook with same amount of CPU power, it ended up in an installation of LXDE just with KStars and its dependnecies. This worked fine But now I migrated to a "newer" old laptop (ThinkPad R400) 2GB of RAM should more than enough for a lightweight setup. An SSD is useful of your X31 is able to use its speed, for astrometry.net offline solving it is very nice to use a SSD, but a normal HDD is enough in many cases.
Stay away from Gnome/KDE, it's a bit like Windows.... bloated with hundreds of things you don't need nor will use.
I would recommend Debian stable, minimum install, and do a search on "tilled" window managers, super light they are.
That's of course depends on your Linux skills.
thank you for your replies! I guess I will give it a try then. I thought about archlinux as a light weight distribution. It is my understanding that I could still use kstars and ekos but do not have to use KDE as a window manager, right?
that is correct, I do not use KDE on my laptop and have Kstars running fine. Last time I used KDE as a desktop was a century ago and probably for 2 min max