I have an Acer Aspire One (very low spec mini laptop from ~2010) with 2GB of ram; it runs modern linux distros with xfce with better performance than it had running Windows 7 when it was new (which is what it came pre-installed with). Doesn’t run much modern software obviously but it does work for web browsing (firefox). It’s noticeably slow, but it always was.
About the same, I have an old netbook HP Mini 311 with an Atom 270 or something, it came with 1GB of RAM and winXP, I installed another 2GB to have 3GB, worked fine, then installed MX Linux with Xfce, even the nvidia GPU was working fine in it.
For fun I tried to install win10Pro, it worked!!! was basically unusable, but it booted to the desktop.
Yeah, though last I looked, Xfce was still really X11-only, so unless that’s changed, I’m assuming that you’re running X11. A lot of my unknown here is “how does a Wayland-based system operate under low memory environments”, because that — well, and systemd, but I’d bet that systemd is less memory-critical — is probably the largest chunk of the system that got replaced in recent years.
searches
It sounds like it’s working in very preliminary form, but they’ve got a ways to go:
For Xfce 4.20, the plan was to add preliminary support to Wayland to core components without losing X11 support. This doesn’t mean that by the next major release an Xfce session on Wayland will offer all existing features, but we hope it will be minimally usable. We also intend to continue refining our applications to work acceptably on Wayland (those that already work or can be made to work with low effort).
For Xfce 4.22, the stabilization work continues. Reaching X11 feature parity is not yet our target.
We are now working on our own Wayland compositor. It is very early, under heavy development, and not usable yet. Please see its FAQ for further information.
I have an Acer Aspire One (very low spec mini laptop from ~2010) with 2GB of ram; it runs modern linux distros with xfce with better performance than it had running Windows 7 when it was new (which is what it came pre-installed with). Doesn’t run much modern software obviously but it does work for web browsing (firefox). It’s noticeably slow, but it always was.
About the same, I have an old netbook HP Mini 311 with an Atom 270 or something, it came with 1GB of RAM and winXP, I installed another 2GB to have 3GB, worked fine, then installed MX Linux with Xfce, even the nvidia GPU was working fine in it.
For fun I tried to install win10Pro, it worked!!! was basically unusable, but it booted to the desktop.
Yeah, though last I looked, Xfce was still really X11-only, so unless that’s changed, I’m assuming that you’re running X11. A lot of my unknown here is “how does a Wayland-based system operate under low memory environments”, because that — well, and systemd, but I’d bet that systemd is less memory-critical — is probably the largest chunk of the system that got replaced in recent years.
searches
It sounds like it’s working in very preliminary form, but they’ve got a ways to go:
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap