Hi /wsr/, I'm trying to install some linux on my Dell D430 maxed with 2gb ram

Yes it's slow as shit but I ran endeavour os on it for a good while, sure web browsing was torture but I liked writing and stuff on it. A few months ago I updated (KDE) endeavour and it stopped booting to desktop, it would try to load the desktop but would freeze/crash and return to the login screen. Manjaro XFCE and Fedora XFCE do the same thing, they might run for a sec but if I do much of anything with them (launching any program) they freeze and kick me to the login screen. Fedora doesn't even make it past the installer. Is this intentional behaviour when there's no ram free? It can't be, the live USB has like 8gb of swap space

TL;DR why do arch and debian distros crash out to the login screen when I try to do anything on this pc?

As a bonus these distros also do this on a Samsung N210, which is e-waste but still

Have you tried any of these?

Linux Lite, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Bodhi Linux, antiX Linux, BunsenLabs Linux

>>1529694 (OP)
Why do you assume it's because of RAM if it use to work, with KDE nonetheless?
Try a distro with an older kernel like Debian maybe.

>>1529694 (OP)
Try booting into a TTY and try startplasma-x11 and xinit and see if you can get useful error messages. Check journalctl -xe and /var/log/Xorg.0.log. If your process is being killed due to low memory, OOM killer should leave a message in the journal. In the last year, I've ran Debian 12 with KDE on a computer with 2 GB of RAM and a bit of swap and it handled fine. If you want to test that it's not just RAM, try using a WM. If a light-weight WM doesn't work, you're probably experiencing a regression due to the updates you installed.

>>1529694 (OP)
Try LTS Ubuntu flavors. First 24, then 22.