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?
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.
Oh, that's pretty neat info. I'm more of an Arch user but I might give Linux mint a try now that I know that. Thanks
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.
If you are still using X, get Fluxbox, very lightweight, requires some config, but that is fairly easy.
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.
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.
That's very surprising knowing kde GUI is less minimalist than xfce one, if it's true then good job kde team.
For something with that little memory, I would use a minimal window manager; you'll want every megabyte of memory if you want to have any chance at running something like a javascript-capable browser without constantly hammering swap. fvwm, cwm, jwm, and ratpoison are all small window managers I enjoy; but do your own research into what window manager is the best for you.
Xfce, LXQt or just install JWM and enjoy the 30 Mb idle RAM usage
If it was for me I could use something like that. But I don't think the person I'll give the pc to would be able to lol
If it's for someone else, I'd pick Mate or XFCE. Should feel familiar to Windows (which is what I'd guess they're coming from), and it should be light enough to work on that hardware.
ElementaryOS comes with Pantheon, which is also very light, iirc, and it might be worth trying out via a live ISO.
Could you tell me what would be lacking? There's a surprising amount of bells and whistle s you can add to the setup. Check out bunsenlabs distro for an example.
Probably lxqt. https://lxqt-project.org/ Very lightweight yet a full-on DE (minus bells and whistles). Found on most Linux distros repositories.
Yeah I'll check LXQT. It's been a long time since I thinkered with distros an DEs. Thanks
By the way, you might also investigate window managers, which aren't as full-featured as DE's but are even lighter on resources. Back in the day before KDE and Gnome, I used Window Maker , which is based on Steve Job's NextStep's UI. Only works with X, not Wayland, though. https://www.windowmaker.org/
Moksha Heck, just install Bodhi Linux 7, your choice between Ubuntu based or Debian based.
You could try Niri. I have tested it with a ~10 year old notebook with a 1st gen Core i5 cpu.
But, even newest Gnome runs smooth on this machine.
