I’d try Xubuntu or Lubuntu, but honestly KDE should run fine on those specs.
I suspect it has an HDD: you’ll get a much more noticeable boost from upgrading to a $35 SSD than any distro choice will give you.
Can confirm. I had a 2007 laptop (Compal FL90) with far worse specs. Core 2 Duo T7100 (I upgraded it to T7500, small difference), Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT, 4GB DDR2 RAM (previously 3GB). Then I replaced the original 80GB Fujitsu HDD made in September 2006 for a cheap SSD. Damn. I started using that laptop most of the time. It felt way faster than my main laptop (with SMR HDD).
I got extra 2 years out of it before it died. I really miss that laptop.
Edit: I ran Linux Mint Cinnamon and Windows 11 on it. Yes, 11.
Why would you upgrade your worst laptop with ssd?
I upgrade the device that needs the upgrade the most. Old, slow drive getting old enough that I need to consider reliability? Obvious upgrade. Old machine is lower capacity then I would like? High value upgrade. Which machine is going to see the most dramatic improvement? Let’s upgrade the old one first.
Makes sense to me.
As a side note, I have found using older laptops has given me a lot of peace of mind in truly using them “on the go”. I used to live in fear of my laptop getting forgotten at the pub when I grab a drink after work, stolen from the car, dropped as I dry to open a door with full hands, left in the sun on the seat next to me on the restaurant patio, having a drink spilled on it, getting fried plugging in to a sketchy plug in the customer’s warehouse, water damage in the rent while camping, and the like. I mean, who wants to risk $2000 to any of those scenarios. But having an old work horse, or a $200 steal I found online, or even the MacBook that I found at the recycle depot that only needed a $50 battery? Well, I am not nearly as worried about putting those machines at risk. As a result, intake and I use them everywhere. Oh, and I have them everywhere ( I often leave one in the car and have it when I find myself somewhere longer than expected. I have a laptop that sits in my young son’s room that I pull out while I sit with him at night sometimes. Super handy.
As a result, guess which machines I spend the most time on? It is the old ones. So upgrading the old machines actually has a bigger overall impact on my life.
My experience has been that, with Linux, old machines work surprisingly well for most of what I need them to do.
You've convinced me. I've just ordered ssd. We'll see how it goes.
Seriously, I put an SSD in a Netbook(remember those?) for a friend and the performance increased noticeably, even with it running Windows 10. I bet it would've been even better if it was using something less bloated than Windows, but that's what my friend wanted.
Yeah, laptop HDDs are shitty usually.
Debian XFCE
Ubuntu uses snaps, which I've found sluggish on older ide hard drives. To be honest, even flatpaks are very slow for these in my experience.
I think you might be better off with opensuse tumbleweed.
Novelty recommendation besides tumbleweed: antix.
While I haven't used antix except out of curiosity in a virtual machine, they are lightweight, but they have a hard stance against systemd.
Thanks, I have installed tumbleweed today and I like it. It is much faster too. I'm unsure about learning two different sets of commands just when I'm switching. I guess I have time to decide until my ssd arrives.
I've used a lot of distributions over the years, and I don't think you have to worry about a different set of commands across most distributions. It's some variation of distropkgmgr followed by command, where command, where command is generally one of install upgrade refresh/update remove search to name the most common. If you use a software frontend like gnome-software or discover, you don't even need to worry about command line differences.
The only exception to that is nixos, which I wouldn't recommend to someone just switching. It is very cool, just needs more experience.
The shell commands are the same one installed for the most part.
Out of curiosity, are you planning to use a different os when your ssd arrives? I switched from Ubuntu to endeavouros (Arch) to Opensuse tumbleweed on my primary laptop (i9 processor), no complaints 😁!
Very cool.
Interesting timing that opensuse recently announced slowroll, which has a slower cadence for updates (updates with monthly frequency, rather than daily, while security updates are still ASAP.
Depending on whether frequent updates is you thing or you prefer slightly delayed cycles.. you can easily convert your install to slowroll
To be honest, I don't really care that much. Once upon a time I got excited about updates and new features, now I just want things to work. I enjoy exploring Linux and how it's different, I like seeing the updates come in and it makes me feel safer, but at the end of the day, I'm just a normal user who needs much less than the OS offers.
give AntiX a shot, I run it on my own older laptop and it's super snappy. Be aware it doesn't come with a DE, just your choice of 4 WMs, and is quite bare bones but still a fully functional Distro out of the box.
If you're married to Ubuntu, I'd suggest Xubuntu. It's Ubuntu using the XFCE desktop environment. XFCE can be a little... hard on the eyes by default, but it's super lightweight, very stable, and very customizable. It can be a very aesthetically pleasing DE with a little theming and an icon pack.
Outside of Ubuntu, Id suggest Linux Mint with XFCE. I know, I know, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu so why bother? Well, it's not Canonical. They've done some great things over the years, but recently... I just tend to stay away.
Personally, I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Love it, I'll never leave it. It's amazing. But without knowing your personal preferences or use cases, and with the info in your post, I have to recommend Xubuntu or Linux Mint XFCE. Also I agree with the other commenter, you'd benefit a lot from an upgrade to an SSD.
Well, I've ordered ssd and installed openSuse tumbleweed. I like it and it's much snappier too, but the command line is different to ubuntu and I don't think i want to learn two sets of commands. I guess I'll have to decide which way I want to go.
You won't go wrong no matter which you end up choosing. I am personally a huge fan of the way OpenSUSE runs their ship, and some of the tools there are incredible.
YaST, for example, is a system management tool that provides the most extensive GUI for managing your system settings I've seen on a Linux distro period. Yes, all the settings can be managed from a terminal, but it's nice to have a graphical option sometimes.
Just play around with it since you've already got it installed, and see how you like it. There's a strong and friendly community surrounding the distro, so reach out if you've got any questions! You're also welcome to ask me. I may not have all the answers, but I'm pretty certain I can find someone who can help lol.
I've tried a few distos, but as for you, opensuse is the way to go for me. I got a new ssd to replace my old hdd and it's super fast. The new OS is like a shiny new toy that will keep me entertained for awhile. In the end, I'm just a normal person and won't need most of the features, but it's nice to have them.
If you haven't yet, I would run the following commands:
sudo zypper install opi
opi codecs
This will enable the Packman repositories (repos will commonly used non-free software, like multimedia codecs) and install multimedia codecs for watching videos and playing music and the like.
Anyway, I'm glad you're enjoying OpenSUSE! It's a delightful distro and community.
I use Debian because it runs on everything, and XFCE because it runs on everything and I've never wanted to waste much of the oomph on the GUI anyway. Looks and feels and works well enough, and that's all I care.
KDE should run fine on those specs, I would try to replace the hard drive, I had one of those slow down a Laptop to a point where I almost threw it away but with a new one everything worked fine again. If it doesn't I would say as a beginner Linux Mint with ether XFCE or Mate should be a great choice but I doubt you need it with those specs tbh!
I've ordered an ssd so hopefully that will do the trick. Meanwhile I installed openSuse and it improved the speed significantly.
I don't think it's a SSD vs HDD situation (both should work perfectly fine with any DE) but rather a case of old and dieing HDD, that's at least what caused my system to fuck up two years ago or somethimg like that. There are systems that work better on far slower than HDD (today only "achived" by dieing HDDs) speed tho so I could imagine that improving the situation, just don't sotre important stuff on that till you got a new drive!
Is it a Core i7 or a Core 2 series processor? 2007 would suggest the latter, and I would absolutely argue for either that you really should prefer something with Xfce or a similar lightweight desktop (maybe Cinnamon or MATE).
I'd probably recommend Linux Mint as a lightweight user-friendly distro, and I'd suggest any of the three available variants based on what you like the most aesthetically.
Additionally, if you haven't opened them up for a while, pick up an inexpensive SSD for both of them if they don't have them already. Modern OSes really expect an SSD over a spinning disk as the boot drive.
I misremembered the specs it's actually i7-2630m, which indicates that I thought I got the laptop later than I thought. I've ordered a ssd so hopefully that will improve the speed.
I ran Mint with Maté until recently on a core2duo with 4GB of RAM and it ran quite well.
I only really retired that machine because I bought a new daily driver... It still works fine actually (except for the battery)
If you are an advanced user voidlinux is very good for laptops, in my experience without systemd you have faster boot timings.
+1 for Void Linux
+1 Void Linux revived my old ThinkPad very well.
Use the image with XFCE and glibc for the easiest time.
Zorin OS Lite, or Xubuntu. Both are based on XFCE and should be a lot lighter than stock Ubuntu.
If you want something even lighter (still based on XFCE), Puppy Linux (QuickPup) might be a good option. One of the things that makes Puppy so fast is that it run entirely from RAM, so it doesn't need to touch the HDD to access files. It saves all disk changes to an overlay filesystem which runs in the RAM, and when you're done with your session, you get an option to save it do your HDD (there's also an option to periodically save your session). Puppy can be a bit quirky but it really makes a big difference on an old system, so it's definitely worth checking out IMO.
Thanks, I've ordered ssd and I'm trying opensuse now. Puppy linux sounds great for persistent usb set up. I'll definitely try it.
Try running the same distro on a live USB drive. If it runs faster on USB then it's likely your HD that's the problem. As many have said, XFCE is very light weight, if you can't get KDE running smoothly. As an experiment you could try installing Fedora. The way the installer works is that it boots a live version, which you can use. In the live version you have an icon to install to your system. Use the live version a while, then install and run the installed version. Normally the installed version should be noticably faster.
MX Linux, it is using Debian Xfce, it should run ok
I think Zorin Lite OS will be good distro for a old laptop becuase I also install this distro on my very old computer(16 Years Old and have 2gb ram and Pentium Processor) and It work fine.
but it seems quite sluggish.
For some odd reason I will ask did you check your scaling governor?
It's an i7 Intel processor with 8gb
Whoa nelly! I have old i5 and had 8gb, now 16.
I use gentoo across many of my devices, even on ARM SBCs, but it's notwhat everyone would like. For SBCs I compile binary packages with my configs.
Do laptop and pc have same processor?
Also what is your GPU?
My apologies, it's only 4gb ram and I did overestimated the age as well. It's i7-2630m processor, video is nvidia gt 540m.
Based on another commenter's advice I installed openSuse tumbleweed and it is quite snappy and I like it, but I've noticed that working terminal is different and since I'm transitioning from Windows and learning Linux I don't want to learn two sets of commands. Decisions, decisions...
It's i7-2630m processor
I have sandybridge too)
video is nvidia gt 540m.
Maybe it will be useful to read on nouveau reclocking
Based on another commenter's advice I installed openSuse tumbleweed and it is quite snappy and I like it
Yes, good stuff. I used it, worked well.
Linux I don't want to learn two sets of commands.
Across POSIX-compatible systems commands are same, except system-specific like packet manager
In that case I'll most likely stick with opensuse on the laptop.
I always like to use zorin os lite or xubuntu, both based on xfce. linux mint could also be a good choice, or maybe, if it's still not good lubuntu
You don't really need to switch to a different distro. Just avoid snaps/flatpack/... and use a more lightweight desktop like XFCE and you should be fine.
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