I want to revive an old Lenovo laptop with an AMD A6 2.6GHz and 4GB ram, what would be the best option for a DE?
PSA no matter how light your distro, any modern app or webpage will use all that power
Its fairly difficult to find “up-to-date” performance / RAM comparisons of Linux Desktop environments, but here’s a decent one from 2019 comparing memory usage of different Ubuntu flavors.
The most surprising thing is that despite KDE Plasma’s reputation as being more ram-hungry, it actually used less ram than XFCE, meaning its developers have been making performance a focus.
I usually go with Xfce.
I’d go with XFCE
@Crying4625 If you don’t mind use Xorg, go with XFCE
I personally prefer LXQT, specially since Wayland development is already work in progressWayland development is also well under way for Xfce.
I was debating myself between those 2. I like xfce, and they announced recently that they have plans to move to Wayland but maybe I’ll give LXQT a try to see what it is like. Thanks for the answer
I think XFCE has way more themes etc. Both are extremely themable though.
If you are still using X, get Fluxbox, very lightweight, requires some config, but that is fairly easy.
+1 for Fluxbox!
It’s such an underrated WM
Yeah, unfortunately it seems like it will not get a Wayland version though…
Yeah……… I wish someone would port it or come out with something similar. Been using Blackbox/Fluxbox since the 2000’s
That’s fast enough to run the latest Linux Mint with Cinnamon. I have two laptops with the exact same cpu speed (passmark score) and 4 GB of ram. With 2 GB swap file you will be in business.
Oh, that’s pretty neat info. I’m more of an Arch user but I might give Linux mint a try now that I know that. Thanks
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cinnamon Cinnamon is available for Arch, would be the same or better
Arch + Cinnamon is neato!
LXQt, XFCE Or a window manager, they’re all lightweight.
I’m running Kubuntu on less than that on a desktop and it works just fine.
Xfce
Does not answer your question, and someone already mentioned it in a thread, but don’t forget zram when only 4GBs are available.
KDE plasma. From my experience it uses less resources than lxqt and xfce and works out of the box while lxqt and xfce required extra work to get wifi, screen brightness controls and audio working. I can have 10+ tabs in a chromium based browser open without lag on an old laptop with 2GB ram and 1.33 - 1.83GHz 4 core intel atom from 10 years ago.
s/chromium/Firefox/g
Technically not a DE, but I like plain openbox.
Wasn‘t there a crunchbang project putting this nicely together with debian? I remember it fondly, but that is centuries ago…
Bunsen Labs and Crunchbang ++ carry that flag now.
There’s also Mabox, Archcraft, and Arco.
A window manager like i3 or Openbox. If you are curious what that’s like, then try out Bunsenlab Linux. (XFWM4 is also a great choice, but it requires some know how to properly rip out the rest of Xfce, like the relatively heavy desktop and the panel)
If you don’t need a full desktop environment, check-out IceWM.
I recently checked-out Trinity ( essentially KDE 3 modernized ) and was surprised how decent it was. I used it in Q4OS but it may be available in your distro.
I use IceWM on antiX. Seems to be a good mix of low resource usage and aesthetics.
