[quote=“Aragorn, post:20, topic:47814”]
But I am sure as hell that a swap shouldn’t be more than twice the size of the ram. Having 25-50% more than the ram size is recomended. having 12 gb swap for a 4gb ram wouldn’t be such a great idea for even modern ssd(s). As far as my 5200rpm hdd, that sure isn’t good for my pc performance. 
Well, Hell is said to be the place where all the wrong things reside, so I wouldn’t take that opinion for correct. 
Look, your machine is limited in its resources, which includes both the processing speed and the amount of RAM. However, you’re going to be using a modern operating system on it, with modern applications, and these are now posing bigger demands on the hardware’s resources than back in the day when that machine was built.
There’s just no way around it. You are going to need more virtual memory, and so the smaller your RAM, the bigger your swap partition needs to be.
Then imagine what your performance is going to be like with less swapping capacity, or even with no swap at all.
Alright then, seems like i have to rob a bank to buy enough ram for my pc. 
I have 4GB of DRR3 on my Thinkpad T430 and I set the Swap Partition to 8GB.
Not to make you upset or anything, but as other Users are tell you, The really old Computer you are trying to use needs to recycled.
This is what I considered to be Minimal Specs to be even usable in 2021:
A Modern 64-bit Dual Core CPU w/ SMT.
4GB of Memory. I wouldn’t go older then DDR3.
~400GB HHD. A ~500GB SSD will be preferable.
Note if using a Before Ryzen APU, quad core will be required. But you will be somewhat performance limited.
You should still be able to find DDR3 modules today, and they will be fairly cheap. And if all else fails, then you may be able to find some used modules on eBay. 
If you had an older PC that uses DDR3 then you wouldn’t need to rob a bank to more memory. As DDR3 is still fairly cheap.
I’ve got 16GB RAM, over here. I’ve never seen it use more than 6GB, and I STILL have some (obviously unused) swap space.
But I agree and understand the reason. That is why the less RAM you have, the slower your PC is going to be. It’s just how it is, whether we like it or not.
Sure, you might be able to get away with only 1GB. It’ll not even be close to optimal, though. And if you make your decision based on that, you’ll make an ill-informed decision.
Rather take a shortcut:
Rob a memory bank. That way you get the RAM quicker and you cut out thee middle man by obtaining it directly from the supplier.
I have 16GB myself with a 2GB Swap Partition and to my knowledge the Swap isn’t used at all.
Exactly my point! Didn’t think I’d need it, but rather have it there than not!
Well, so many replies in such a short time! I can’t reply or point out some faults for all of the comments. But you can hear mine.
I can’t but think, on the 4gb laptop i said about at the top of the post, i booted manjaro from a virtualbox vm with 2gb of ram from the live iso file. It took around 20 seconds to start. I opened firefox, and opened 4-5 tabs simultaneously and it worked pretty fine. It used around 900 mb ram from which manjaro uses 500-600 mb of ram. So how do u explain that? If i get a bit slow performance on a live(not installed) manjaro on just a VM, i think i would get pretty good performace on an actual installed system.
You can see a detailed info on my laptop (not the pc) in this pdf- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rkwMspqcDlqKovqMrn6uGtuVDgBSstWL/view?usp=sharing. The model is HP stream x360 convertible 11aa0xx. (sorry i couldn’t give you the link properly)
Just to show ram usage on my machine (KDE) with Thunderbird, and Firefox open (I do have quite many tabs open). This is not a heavy usage for me and I am still using 3 Gb of RAM (I have no SWAP).
Of course people have different use-cases, and maybe 4 GB will be enough for you and maybe it won’t. I guess we will never know unless you try. If it is not enough, then a lighter distro might be the answer for you. If it is enough, then welcome to the Manjaro community 
So does it mean i am enough with 4gb?
That depends on how you use your machine. It is kind of impossible to say for someone else. The only thing I know, is that we will never know unless you give it a try. Maybe it will be enough and maybe not. IF you have doubts, then don’t try it. IF you are curious and willing to try, go for it. We here can’t take that decision for you.
This all depends on you and what you are willing to do.
4 GiB should be enough, but bear in mind that an onboard GPU will claim some of that for itself ─ the amount of RAM it claims can often be configured in the BIOS or UEFI.
Yet, even with 4 GiB of RAM, you’ll still need a swap partition, and the lighter your desktop environment, the smoother it’ll be. XFCE and KDE Plasma are about on par with one another nowadays ─ some even say that Plasma needs less RAM than XFCE ─ but you’ll be better off with LXQt or LXDE, or even with a simple window manager like OpenBox.
I will say that LXDE is more usable Out of the Box then Openbox is. Not as much as Xfce however.
As I did mention earlier, I consider 4GB to be lower limit of usable RAM.
what do you make of that?
For this hardware, I would use one of the window manager editions. Openbox, bspwm, i3 or awesome. Jwm is an option too. Lxde is probably fine too, even though it is heavier.
But lubuntu is a good distro too. Each use case is different, and manjaro is not the best answer for everything. Besides bspwm and openbox editions, not many editions really fly on 1Gb ram. Those two consume about 100Mb ram and are generally optimized for low end hardware. But they don’t receive quite as much development resources as official editions and they are not traditional desktop environments. I would maybe consider looking into puppy linux or antix in your case.
You should just use what you like best.
Any and all points are subject to bias.
I couldn’t agree more. In any case, the experience will be limited due to hardware used. And investing money in upgrades? Better to put it into other hardware. There are sites like ebay…
