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?
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.
I’d go with XFCE
Xfce
Does not answer your question, and someone already mentioned it in a thread, but don’t forget zram when only 4GBs are available.
river or sway
I recently bought netbook on AMD c50 for 20$ and firstly, i bought some ram and ssd, luckily ddr3 is very cheap, one or two 8gb sodimm modules and 256gb ssd, or in my case 360gb because price was the same when i ordered them, 360gb was even slightly cheaper, so what i was trying to say, this small cheap upgrade will make a world of difference, and when they’ll arrive I’m planning to install “tumbleweed kde” , whole cost of upgrade is 8$ for one module of 8gb ddr3 sodimm, and 17$ for 360gb ssd, 256gb price was the same as i said before
Ironically, ChromeOS Flex would run smooth on those specs, since it does so on my dogshit Samsung Chromebook 3 with shittier specs.
What the hell is that monstrosity?
ChromeOS. It’s relatively simple, secure and runs on older hardware.
PSA no matter how light your distro, any modern app or webpage will use all that power
I usually go with Xfce.
@Crying4625 If you don’t mind use Xorg, go with XFCE
I personally prefer LXQT, specially since Wayland development is already work in progressWayland development is also well under way for Xfce.
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
I think XFCE has way more themes etc. Both are extremely themable though.
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
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cinnamon Cinnamon is available for Arch, would be the same or better
Arch + Cinnamon is neato!
I’m running Kubuntu on less than that on a desktop and it works just fine.
If you are still using X, get Fluxbox, very lightweight, requires some config, but that is fairly easy.
+1 for Fluxbox!
It’s such an underrated WM
Yeah, unfortunately it seems like it will not get a Wayland version though…
Yeah……… I wish someone would port it or come out with something similar. Been using Blackbox/Fluxbox since the 2000’s
LXQt, XFCE Or a window manager, they’re all lightweight.
Technically not a DE, but I like plain openbox.
Wasn‘t there a crunchbang project putting this nicely together with debian? I remember it fondly, but that is centuries ago…
Bunsen Labs and Crunchbang ++ carry that flag now.
There’s also Mabox, Archcraft, and Arco.