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?
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Does Xfce count as light? It’s got plenty of features. Should fit in 4gb well enough though.
Well when I used tu it like 12 years ago it was very light. I’ll have to check now. Thanks for the answer
If xfce doesnt count as light I don’t know what would
Xfce
PSA no matter how light your distro, any modern app or webpage will use all that power
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)
I usually go with Xfce.
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.
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/
Your biggest problem is going to be the 4 GB of RAM. Saving a few hundred megs on the DE will help but not much. If you run a web browser ( and I cannot imagine using a computer without one ) that RAM is going to fill up fast.
Honestly, I would use a 32 bit distro on that hardware.
Q4OS with Trinity, Antix, Adelie, and DSL are all pretty decent options.
What’s wrong with 4Gb? It works fine for light usage and you can enable swap to a SSD for when you want something a little memory hungry like a lot of tabs.
I used a system with 6 GB daily until not long ago. I had to constantly restart my web browsers to reclaim memory. RAM was a constant issue. A 32 bit distro made things a lot better.
Zram
I love OB with tint2 and conky , no de needed.
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
I think what you need is LXQT in that case. It’s light while still being a DE.
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.
honestly they are all pretty good at this point. start with the default ur distro supports. if that isn’t to your taste try kde/plasma, gnome or lxde
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.
Does not answer your question, and someone already mentioned it in a thread, but don’t forget zram when only 4GBs are available.
Is the A6 from 2017/18? Should be fine with anything. My wife’s laptop is from 2010/11. I tried all the DEs because of the lightness claims, I found GNOME worked the best, and it is super peppy running NixOS.
I asked online why GNOME would perform better than what is assumed a lighter DE, and a comouter dude says GNOME goes and gets everything it needs and caches it when you launch something so retrieval is faster in the app, KDE loads stuff on demand as it is asked for so a alow CPU and HDD hinderes KDE for me.
if you can afford it, by 4 more gigs of RAM
Get an SSD as it will make your life way better
I did that later but this laptop only supports SATA II speeds so it helped, but isn’t game changing like it would be on SATA III speeds
Does it have a PCIe slot for an extra WiFi card? You might be able to adapt it.
No it’s too old and cheap for extra slots. But for 2011 it runs office stuff, zoom calls, etc perfectly fine. With w10 it was a complete brick.
XFCE or LxQT but i have a preference for XFCE if it is for normal use.
Same. Mostly because I used to run XFCE some years ago, but I might give LXQT a try. Thanks
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.
I use IceWM on antiX. Seems to be a good mix of low resource usage and aesthetics.
