I want to revive an old Lenovo laptop with an AMD A6 2.6GHz and 4GB ram, what would be the best option for a DE?

  • OsrsNeedsF2P
    30·
    5 months ago

    PSA no matter how light your distro, any modern app or webpage will use all that power

  • TrentEnglish
    24·
    5 months ago

    I usually go with Xfce.

    • Crying4625OP
      1·
      5 months ago

      I was debating myself between those 2. I like xfce, and they announced recently that they have plans to move to Wayland but maybe I’ll give LXQT a try to see what it is like. Thanks for the answer

  • EugeniaEnglish
    141·
    5 months ago

    That’s fast enough to run the latest Linux Mint with Cinnamon. I have two laptops with the exact same cpu speed (passmark score) and 4 GB of ram. With 2 GB swap file you will be in business.

  • Zier@fedia.io
    12·
    5 months ago

    I’m running Kubuntu on less than that on a desktop and it works just fine.

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
    121·
    5 months ago

    If you are still using X, get Fluxbox, very lightweight, requires some config, but that is fairly easy.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    91·
    5 months ago

    If you don’t need a full desktop environment, check-out IceWM.

    I recently checked-out Trinity ( essentially KDE 3 modernized ) and was surprised how decent it was. I used it in Q4OS but it may be available in your distro.

  • cerement@slrpnk.net
    92·
    5 months ago
    • the big guns: Gnome or Plasma
    • the middle tier: Xfce or LXQt
    • the lightweights: tiling window managers (and there’s a LOT to choose from)
    • the alternative crowd: Mate, Cinnamon, Regolith
    • Crying4625OP
      5·
      5 months ago

      I think gnome and KDE Plasma are just too heavy. And I would use a WM if it was for me, in fact that what I use in my daily driver but it is for someone not that tech savvy. I may check one from the alternative crowd tho. Thanks for the answer

      • folkrav@lemmy.ca
        4·
        5 months ago

        I seem to remember hearing about Plasma having similar memory usage to XFCE. Don’t quote me on that lol

        • krash
          1·
          5 months ago

          Got any guides on how to strip plasma down to the bare necessities? I have it on a machine with 4 GB RAM, but I don’t know how to optimize it for such old hardware.

          • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
            2·
            5 months ago

            I updated this project once. This is a very good start on what packages you need.

            There are metapackages different for each distribution, like plasma-meta on Arch or plasma-workspace on Fedora.

            This may be too bloated, but leaving out some core components (like infocenter or display) may result in random Systemsettings pages missing.

            Also on Fedora, the “Netinstall” “minimal” variant is impossible to include wireless packages (“hardware support” group) so it is easier to start from a normal KDE install and just remove things you dont need.

            Some things are also settings like balooctl disable && balooctl purge

  • DessalinesA
    7·
    5 months ago

    Its fairly difficult to find “up-to-date” performance / RAM comparisons of Linux Desktop environments, but here’s a decent one from 2019 comparing memory usage of different Ubuntu flavors.

    The most surprising thing is that despite KDE Plasma’s reputation as being more ram-hungry, it actually used less ram than XFCE, meaning its developers have been making performance a focus.

  • qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de
    72·
    5 months ago

    KDE plasma. From my experience it uses less resources than lxqt and xfce and works out of the box while lxqt and xfce required extra work to get wifi, screen brightness controls and audio working. I can have 10+ tabs in a chromium based browser open without lag on an old laptop with 2GB ram and 1.33 - 1.83GHz 4 core intel atom from 10 years ago.

  • Sina@beehaw.org
    61·
    5 months ago

    A window manager like i3 or Openbox. If you are curious what that’s like, then try out Bunsenlab Linux. (XFWM4 is also a great choice, but it requires some know how to properly rip out the rest of Xfce, like the relatively heavy desktop and the panel)

  • nyan@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    5 months ago

    LXQt, XFCE, Maté, TDE. Any of them will do. Which you choose depends on personal preference and how large an ecosystem you want—LXQt has only a few basic applications, TDE has pretty much everything that was in KDE3, the others are somewhere in between.