Which up-to-date OS will work decently on my Inspiron 910?

Try Lubuntu. Free. Very fast, intuitive, no bloat, supports all hardware without special drivers. Installs from a usb stick. Thousands of apps covering most of your needs (compatible office, Firefox, etc.) . Probably runs in 500k ram but I have more. 4 hours battery life with a good battery. The 910 is a fantastic design so well worth keeping it going!

This might be a too late response, but I was searching for answer to the same question in the past few days, and after several trial-and-errors, I’ve finally settled down with CloudReady Home Edition (32 bit) for my Dell Mini 9 (Inspiron 910). It is essentially a Google Chrome/Chromium folk with minimum bloatware and runs sleekly on my 2GB RAM and 16 GB SSD.

I have recently (April 2019) upgraded a hardly-used Mini 9 that just needed a charger. It had the original 16GB PATA SSD , 1GB DDR2 RAM, Windows XP. I upgraded to 2GB RAM with which it loaded and ran W10 Home Ver 1511, and then upgraded through to 1803. Then it ran out of disk space on the last upgrade but I was able to get it to load and run 1809 with the aid of a USB to 2.5” SATA adapter and a 256GB HDD system disk salvaged from an ASUS EEE-PC 1015PX (32 bit W10 V 1809). W10 works OK but is UNUSABLY slow. On the other hand, the Mini 9 runs Ubuntu Mate 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS just fine, though it can only handle video at about 240p before it turns into a slideshow. Look at Geekbench 4 Browser results for “Inspiron 910 Atom N270” - the Atom N270 in the Minis is the lowest scorer in my personal collection of devices that run W10. Hope that helps.

Go to distrowatch and look for architecture i386 for linux.

use a usb dvd drive, to install the os.

the dell mini 9 aka 910 is a 32 bit system with 64 gb max hard drive and 2 gb max ram.

I use linux mint 16 and ubuntu 14!

ooh get ubcd on cd for stubborn os`s that don`t want to be removed from the harddrive!

I have a Mini 9, that came with 1 GB RAM, 8 GB SSD & WIN XP.

Now, it has 2GB RAM, 64 GB SSD that has been running WIN 10 x32 for years.

Slow and steady, but does everything you need.

Got the same Atom N270 on my good ol' Aspire One, pretty poor performance for today's standards even for light desktop use, nevertheless its strong points were remarkable at the time, netbooks equipped with this single-core Intel CPU made awesome low-cost and low-consumption machines to tinker with - with the advent of mini-itx boards, it wasn't rare to stumble upon cool projects such as DIY car-puters and so on. Sure, it was not suited for multitasking, but you would get a decent and compact starter PC or retro game emulation machine for games from the 80s-90s (up to 16-bit gen probably) for a reasonable price.

Personally I tried many different OSs (even an open source Amiga workbench clone!) among which Ubuntu, but now many 32-bit variants are being discontinued. I suggest you give Antix (Debian based GNU/Linux distro) a try, I have 19.3 on my netbook and it feels super fast, considering it runs on an impossibly slow internal flash drive.

Am running MXlinux 32bit….runs great.

Be sure to try PuppyLinux (BionicPup32). It is a tiny distribution, that uses very little system resources itself, so you have lots of overhead for programs. Have had it run YouTube smooth at 480p right out of the box on much weaker hardware than what is in the Mini 9.

so im currently deling wiht this, ive had a mini 910 offand on for years, I came across one, and he ssd was toast, and I couldn't afford another, o so I sacrificed a USB port, desoldered and soldered in a small female half of a USB extension cable in ,and routed it to the wlan bay un used, i got a 32gb USB drive, and installed ubuntu from another USB drive, its maxed at 2gb ram, and i know it can only see 64 HDD, it ran great for a long time, and then got a replacement and kicked around in a closet for a while, it resurfaced, and my 2 year old son loves it, he's super advanced has a tablet, and was stoked when he saw it, like mine, my size mine, lol and we were doing the ABC on the kyb, and he was stoked, carrying it around and pretending to type like dad and mom doo, - this kids already riding a 2 wheeler without training wheels, rock climbing and doing things 4 yr olds do, speech and logic and memory, etc, i swear this kids gonna be riding a 50cc dirt bike and coding by the time he's 5 yr old, lol watch out world,

anyways, i wanted to run ubuntu and tried the new v 20, i found that it doesn't work for the 910 but requires the IoT version that now runs the atom N CPUs,
before the regular ubuntu 14 worked fine, but 20 does not,
- I'm downloading 20 IoT now, and ill see if it takes and runs any better, it is supposedly lighter and meant for smaller setups, so it may breathe some live in the 910 once more,

, idk i thought some of you would like my USB hack workaround and repurpose of the 910 minis, that initially was sold for ubuntu and is one the only systems that i know of that came OEM with ubuntu and was designed for it,

- I know this is another thread question, but does anyone know of any ubuntu coding games for kids, toddlers, boolean logic gates, and that kind of thing?