Mint Xfce on my 2015 laptop compared to its previous system was the difference between usable and waiting 10 minutes for it to even boot, and things like gaming, VMs, comically large spreadsheets (surprisingly the memory hog), etc., were an eternal challenge on it. On my current laptop, I have the luxury of picking the systems by aesthetics and non-optimization functions instead. And to compare, I’ve run even the same updates on the two laptops, as the older one still works.
Mint Xfce on my 2015 laptop compared to its previous system was the difference between usable and waiting 10 minutes for it to even boot, and things like gaming, VMs, comically large spreadsheets (surprisingly the memory hog), etc., were an eternal challenge on it. On my current laptop, I have the luxury of picking the systems by aesthetics and non-optimization functions instead. And to compare, I’ve run even the same updates on the two laptops, as the older one still works.