Hello there. I'm a beginner so keep that in mind. I have an old laptop (something like 10 yo). It has an HDD, 4 gigs of DDR3, an i3 4th gen 1.7
GHz and an NVidia Geforce 710M (Windows Game Ready Driver 391.35 WHQL which I think doesn't support Wayland). It also has CSM BIOS so yeah. It has the option of UEFI but the GeForce (I think) doesn't support it.
Currently, it has Windows 10 on it, but it has been veeeeery sluggish. I'm planning to upgrade the RAM to 8 gigs and upgrade to an SSD, but (even if I upgrade those parts) I don't want to use Windows anymore, at all.
So, I have a few options. (kinda in order)
Linux Mint
Fedora, though idk if the 2 GHz requirement is a big problem
Pop!_OS
MX Linux
Debian
Ubuntu and its flavors
Zorin OS
and maybe Solus? though the same problem with fedora.
Yeah yeah ik, all of these except Fedora and Solus are Debian/Ubuntu based.
DE options: (again, also kinda in order)
KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)
Cinnamon
XFCE - LXDE - LXQT (because of "lightweightness" :D)
Budgie
5. GNOME too heavy
These are some options for me. If you have any more suggestions, let me know. Also, are there any compatibility issues with my system for the distros/DEs?
Thanks for the replies in advance.
(Note: this was also posted in the m/linux@kbin.social magazine and the r/linux4noobs subreddit. don't ask why im still on reddit, it's because of Infinity for reddit.)
(Another note: If you saw this post before, it's because of /kbin's issues. I reposted it because no one saw it before.)
That's exactly the kind of hardware that'd get a big a boost in performance by switching to Linux. Go for it! I have so many old machines that have essentially gained a second life when I installed Linux on them. You can't go wrong with either an Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora-based distro. I am not sure what 2Ghz requirement you're talking about, but I've run Fedora on potato class hardware so I think it will be fine.
If you start getting used to Linux after a while, I'd actually suggest Arch because of how slim of a system you can achieve with it and how fast in general it usually is. Of course, if this is your first time using Linux definitely try out some of the friendlier distros first!
Well, uhh, these requirements. But idk.
Yeah I've heard Arch is lightweight, but that might happen in like 5 years :D
These are basically system requirements for Firefox (well, except for disk space, obviously). It doesn't matter much how lightweight your system is when you launch a modern web browser.
To be honest, I think those are more guidelines than anything else. Most distros are largely the same in terms of overall performance. Perhaps some might have a bigger memory footprint due to more applications installed out of the box, but that's about it.