> Tell us more about your laptop. Have you tried booting a Debian live CD
> on it?
Well, my laptop is an Acer Aspire One D255E,
it has 1GB of RAM and an Intel Atom Inside N455
with Intel GMA integrated.
> I recommend against Debian 9, as it is getting old. I generally
> recommend keeping to the current Debian release for security reasons.
Hmm, I thought that Debian 9 received enough security updates, and it still have LTS and ELTS remaining. I don't think it is older than Windows 7 (from 2007, if I remember well)
> root@dragon:~# free -h
> total used free shared buff/cache available
> Mem: 1.2Gi 306Mi 142Mi 6.0Mi 803Mi 771Mi
> Swap: 975Mi 4.0Mi 971Mi
> Total: 2.2Gi 311Mi 1.1Gi
> root@dragon:~#
It doesn't look bad at all. Windows usually have 100MiB to 200MiB free when there are some programs open.