SucukAlright, you know what? I'll be switching.
Hello there. I'm a beginner so keep that in mind. I have an old laptop (something like 10 yo). It has an HDD, 4 gigs of DDR3, an i3 4th gen 1.7...
Madiator2011Go with Pop!_OS you will love it :)
Lucia [she/her]So, I have a few options. (kinda in order)
Linux Mint is the easiest one from the list, but all of them except Solus are fine. I personally recommend Mint or Debian, Debian Sid if you want latest kernel.
KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)
KDE should work fine, maybe with a bit of tweaking?
XFCE - LXDE - LXQT (because of “lightweightness”)
I daily drive Xfce and even on a beefy PC this DE is really great. It may not look cool by default, but it’s very customizable and powerful. And Thunar (xfce file manager) is really good now.
Cinnamon
Another good option
it’s because of Infinity for reddit.
There’s a fork of infinity for Lemmy, called (Eternity)[codeberg.org/Bazsalanszky/Eternity]. Not sure if it’s usable now though.
wildbus8979if you want latest kernel.
I doubt they need the latest kernel, their machine is ancient…
I doubt they need the latest kernel, their machine is ancient…
True
FIFY
Thanks, somehow messed it up.
Linux Mint is the easiest one from the list
I have to try mint, so many people recommend it and its hard to believe something can be easier than popos
Mint is great, my brother used it as his first distro and had no issues whatsoever while I suffered with Fedora.
I use /kbin, once the Artemis app gets kbin.social support, i'll definitely use kbin more.
Linux Mint is the easiest one from the list, but all of them except Solus are fine. I personally recommend Mint or Debian, Debian Sid if you want latest kernel.
No, I don't really need it.
KDE should work fine, maybe with a bit of tweaking?
I thought about that too. If that doesn't work out, Xfce/LXDE/LXQT it is.
Cool. Good luck on your linux journey!
entropicdriftTry Mint Cinnamon, if that’s slow try disabling animations. If it’s still slow, go to XFCE.
Mint really rocks at not requiring you to use the terminal almost ever. For sure the best choice in the “just works” category.
Just try few of these from live usb and pick what you like.
You can use Ventoy and just drag all your ISO images to it but creating few USBs is easiest option for beginners.
There is nothing bad about Debian/Debian based distros and I think that it is great option I started on Mint, tryed Manjaro and get back to Mint.
Marduk73Mint/Cinnamon is easy and a good transitional experience. Whatever you choose, don’t forget to donate whatever you can afford and think it’s appropriate. That helps keep these things available.
GL
I Cast FistI’d personally recommend Linux Mint with XFCE or Cinnamon. XFCE with the Suse style is light and has a built-in search on the start menu, which I consider a must-have.
Mint in general should offer the least amount of resistance for getting everything up and running, including the graphic driver.
Presi300Ubuntu is SLOW on a HDD (has to do with the packaging format they use), I’d personally recommend trying fedora 1st and if that’s also too slow, MXLinux is great. Solus recently got revived, but it’s still got issues so I can’t really recommend it for a 1st distro… And finally, if even MX doesn’t run perfectly, try AntiX, the best Linux distro for really low-end PCs imo.
I’d personally recommend trying fedora 1st
Fedora is even slower though. In my experience Fedora on hdd loads as slow as win10. MX is great though, as well as antiX
i’ve taken to running apt inside
eatmydata, makes it run way faster since it doesn’t call fsync constantly. granted, you could end up in an invalid state if the power goes out, but that’s what UPSs, laptop batteries and backups are for :)
Well uhhhhhhh, when my "laptop"s plug is pulled out or the power goes out, it's dead :D. might need a battery change or an ups...
Definitely get a battery change. Lithium batteries that old can become dangerous and even explode.
Linux Mint with XFCE is what I’d go with
Kubuntu if you want KDE. Your hardware should run it fine. Mint XFCE or Xubuntu if you want to optimize for speed.
Just adding on that if you do go Kubuntu, OP, get the LTS 22.04 version. Since you’ve got older hardware there’s really not much point in using newer kernels. Ubuntu LTS (and therefore Mint, since it’s based on it) is just rock solid in the “just works” category as long as your hardware isn’t super new.
VanillaOS check it out
I love Vanilla too, but if he’s concerned Gnome is to heavy for his laptop…
I’ve overlooked that by accident, hopefully with there 2.0v coming soon they release more flavors
They’re talking about a possible KDE spin, but last I saw it was a low priority. Since all the custom GUI tools ate being made in GTK4. In order to do up KDE the way they’re doing Gnome and keeping the desktop as “vanilla” as possible, it would be a pretty big job converting all that stuff to QT I would think.
Yea that’s true, gtk4 is exciting as well as android containers
I’m looking forward to playing with a Nix container. I honestly can’t think of a single Android app I want to run on my desktop… But it’s gonna be fun for you!
I completely forgot about the NIX one
As a complete Linux noob coming from Windows, I’d say Mint is the way to go. If you’re worried about Cinnamon being too heavy, Mate is much lighter and a lot of fun. I’m especially fond of their file browser Caja.
Your second choice, Fedora, is my go to system, and I’ll cheerfully sing it’s praises. If you want to go that way, check out the KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, or LXDE spins, but I will say it’s a bit less beginner friendly. Make sure you enable the non-free repositories when you log in for the first time!
Lets fucking go. Definitely try the three OG desktops Gnome, KDE and Xfce. The first two are the biggest ones with tons of features and a big development team.
That’s exactly the kind of hardware that’d get a big a boost in performance by switching to Linux. Go for it! I have so many old machines that have essentially gained a second life when I installed Linux on them. You can’t go wrong with either an Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora-based distro. I am not sure what 2Ghz requirement you’re talking about, but I’ve run Fedora on potato class hardware so I think it will be fine.
If you start getting used to Linux after a while, I’d actually suggest Arch because of how slim of a system you can achieve with it and how fast in general it usually is. Of course, if this is your first time using Linux definitely try out some of the friendlier distros first!
Well, uhh, these requirements. But idk.
Yeah I've heard Arch is lightweight, but that might happen in like 5 years :D
To be honest, I think those are more guidelines than anything else. Most distros are largely the same in terms of overall performance. Perhaps some might have a bigger memory footprint due to more applications installed out of the box, but that’s about it.
These are basically system requirements for Firefox (well, except for disk space, obviously). It doesn’t matter much how lightweight your system is when you launch a modern web browser.
XFCE is a great option. I consider it middle ground as low resource needs, but also has most of the features you want in a DE. Things like IceWM or OpenBox are even lighter, but less featureful
PuppyOSAndCoffeeI like puppy Linux. It can be a bit quirky but it is very very fast.
Here is an oddball solution, the lightest way to have GNU/Linux and be able to use GUI applications like Firefox is to simply start a bare bones os install X-Server and something like dmenu, That’s it. Suckless.org, there is a lightweight dwm, a desktop window manager that you can use to tile windows and move them around and more. dmenu will be used to just launch the application. dwm is what manages the windows. Anything past that is based on what you need. It can be a fun challenge to make the most lightweight Firefox browser launcher.
For now, stick with what others have suggested. bare bones installations are usually meant for helping you single out a task and usually offer poor multitasking features until you put a lot of effort into installing and configuring more packages to a satisfying ease of use level.
That’s a horrible recommendation!
Seriously. Do not go for suckless unless you are an advanced user. It is not reasonable to change from a GUI OS to beyond CLI to literally “code it in config.h”. suckless is great but not for beginners.
Why is it that in such posts I don’t see PopOS mentioned anywhere? I’ve been using it on my 8 year old laptop and it works really well! It had Win 10 on it previously and would crash if I opened more than 2 tabs on Firefox.
Was it edited in now? I see it as his third choice.
Oh I meant comments supporting Pop. Don’t see anyone really mention it.
I loved Pop as a new user but they’ve been pretty stagnant update-wise while working on their new desktop environment, so I would personally consider it to have been more buggy (usually with tiling) than other distros and not a great choice until they get that sorted out. Very excited to see it when they’re done though.
Mint it is, rock-solid for beginners
You’re having way too many thoughts about this. I’ll give you a simple choice: It’s either Xubuntu or Linux Mint.
Simply choose by which one looks better to you. Done.
In a year you can look back at your post and decide again if there is anything you want to change or you’re in dire need of a Linux hobby and Gentoo is all you’ve ever been looking for.
Baut [she/her] auf.Linux Mint okay, but Xubuntu?
Isn’t the design gonna throw off any new users?
Isn’t the design gonna throw off any new users?
I think you will have to use legacy nvidia driver as the latest one wouldn’t work. At least such option exists for Arch Linux, no idea what’s like with other distros.
Some other people said you’re thinking too hard. They’re right.
Back up all your shit, install Debian. Try out kde and see if it’s too much. If it is, install cinnamon or something.
I might look into getting a refurbished ThinkPad or something before buying new hardware for this laptop, you’ll probably get a lot more performance out of this than upgrading that old laptop
With regards to performance, the distro matters but the Desktop Environment matters more.
For older hardware, XFCE is going to perform a bit better than GNOME. KDE is a middle-ground. Choose what DE you want first and then go for a distro that runs that well.
HellvolutioNDebian Stable (or testing) with the MATE desktop… I mean, if you wanna use AND learn a little bit of Linux!!! Debian is aways your friend, and it is super rock-solid! Avoid distros with poor documentation, and avoid Ubuntu at all costs… Ubuntu has weird bugs, just like Windows. If you don’t like Debian, I’d say: pick OpenSUSE or ArchLinux…
WeAreAllOneDebian 12 with KDE and call it a day.
Prepare for the Nvidia card to be a pain in the ass, if so, maybe running the official driver on a LTS version of Ubuntu is the best option here.