Eugenia

I personally buy refurbished. Lately I got a Lenovo X280 thinkpad, for $160 with 8 GB of RAM, 1080p screen. Worked fine, Linux flies on it.

I like Cinnamon, stacked on the right (vertical bar) with the third party cinnamenu start menu. Simple, and it works.

No one is making 10" models. You’d need to buy a used netbook from 2010 to get a 10" screen. Get a normal laptop please.

Your biggest problem is the amount of RAM, not the cpu. Some Linux distros would fit nicely on 2gb with a few native apps open, but the moment you’d want to browse the web, all hell will break loose, as each tab will take hundreds of megs each (youtube takes between 600 and 1200 mb of ram). FYI, even if chrome/ium is hated in these parts, it uses less ram than firefox (there’s also a setting to use even less ram).

I’d suggest you use either Alpine Linux with xfce (240 MB of RAM on a cold boot), or even better, Q4OS with the Trinity Desktop (fork of KDE), 350 MB of RAM. The advantage of Q4OS is that it’s a debian, so it can run lots of .deb files made for debian. Alpine is cool and all, but it has bugs on the desktop (some of its package management has dependency problems).

A tip: to save ram, don’t use background images, only a single color. You can save up to 50 MB of RAM that way, depending on the image you’d be using.

Here are your choices to try out yourself and see if they can do what you need:

• GnuCash (distro support, flatpak)
• HomeBank (distro support)
• KMyMoney (distro support, appimage, flatpak)
• ActualBudget ( https://actualbudget.org/ , appimage, flatpak)
• Denaro (the newest on the block with modern UI, flatpak)

And for Android:

• IvyWallet