older laptop distro recommendarion

UnknownQuantity@lemm.ee to Linux@lemmy.ml – 59 points –

Recently I've gave up Windows for Linux and installed Ubuntu with KDE Plasma desktop on my pc and laptop from 2007. It's an i7 Intel processor with 8gb ddr ram so I thought it would be fine, but it seems quite sluggish. What distro could I use that would be faster and still fully functional? Thanks for your help in advance.

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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.

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.

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.

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

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE: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.

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 😁!

I'll keep the desktop with ubuntu and kde plasma and I've installed openSuse tumbleweed on the laptop. The ssd made a huge difference. I've made it dual boot with win7, which I've reinstalled on the laptop and they're both blazing fast. It's a steep learning curve, but I like the freedom of Linux versus the big brother approach of Windows.