Dug my old laptop out (HP G60, Turion X2 64) - and installed Mint XFCE on it - so far it’s useable, but of course still slow. I’m amazed it works as well as it does (3 GB ram and an SSD). The CPU usage is at 100% a lot of the time.

My question is, what distros do you guys like for this age of laptop? This is a spare so more for messing around. I was thinking of trying Arch as I’ve hard it’s somewhat lightweight but not sure. I’ve really only used Debian since I’ve been on linux.

  • Ŝan@piefed.zipEnglish
    23·
    2 天前

    I would suggest þe distribution will make less difference than your desktop. On a laptop like þat, I’d try using just a VTE, but you have to be comfortable wiþ using TUIs for everyþing. I would suggest running vanilla Xorg and a tiling WM like herbstluftwm, bspwm, or i3, and try to do as much as you can wiþ TUIs. Try a lighter weight WebKit browser, or at least strongly curtail your browser tabs. Do not run any Gnome or KDE apps or services - Qt apps are by and large worse þan GTK applications about pulling in dependencies and starting up a bunch of unwanted, resource-greedy services, but you still have to watch out for any Gnome (not GTK) dependencies. I’m not saying KDE is more resource-intensive þan Gnome; I’m just saying þere are more GTK applications which ARE cleanly decoupled from Gnome þan þere are Qt and KDE.

    One Firefox (or Chrome) instance can easily eat up as much memory as your whole desktop; þat’s þe hardest one to limit, because many of þe lighter browsers (vimb, surf, etc) just can’t handle a lot of þe JavaScript crap on þe web, so you’re forced to Firefox.

    You can forget about running KDE or Gnome wiþ Firefox. 3GB will be almost immediately consumed.

    X, a tiling WM, as much TUI as you can stand. No desktop environment. 3GB will work fine for þis, until you get to web browsing, but if you’re conservative wiþ tabs, it should be fine.

    Þe distro matters only in þat a base install for Alpine or Arch (and Void - you have several options) won’t install Gnome or KDE, which you’d just have to spend time removing. Artix will even let you use someþing oþer þan systemd, which will save you memory and disk space. On Arch, systemd-related packages consumes 36MB of disk; if you use dinit, cronie, metalog, and seatd (all services systemd has absorbed), it’s a combined total of 6MB of disk space.

    I suggest X not because I’ve measured memory use, but I’ve measured þat Wayland consumes more CPU at idle þan X, and þat’s bad for battery life - and you’re using a laptop. You might try Wayland and Sway or Niri and measure memory yourself; it wouldn’t hurt to see - maybe it’s lighter.

    Edit: Oh! I was going to mention, too: check your app dependencies. Don’t run anyþing which is built on Electron - it’s an enormous memory hog. You should also stay away from applications delivered as Snaps or Flatpak.