A distro and desktop environment recommendation for an old laptop (Read all of it, please.)
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Linux@kbin.social – 0 points – 'sup? So, I am a beginner that has an old Samsung laptop from 2013 with an i3 4005U, a GeForce 710M, 500GB HDD (I will probably upgrade it to an SSD, but not for now.), 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3L RAM (the same for the HDD, will probably upgrade to 8GB some time.). It currently has Windows 10 Home but Linux is probably lighter (right?) so thats why I want to use it (+customization). I plan on dual booting the two since i might still need Windows for some cases. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance!
(Note: I'm planning on using Linux Mint [which version should I use?] or Pop!_OS, but might look at Zorin OS Elementary OS, Deepin and maaaaaybe Ubuntu and it's flavors. I don't really have an idea on desktop environments. need suggestions.)
(repost because wrong language)
For a desktop environment, I suggest xfce or lxde. They're very lightweight. As for the distro, all the ones you mentioned are Ubuntu-based. Even though there are some lightweight Ubuntu-based distros, like Zorin and Bodhi, you can do better. I'd suggest going for something lighter, such as the Arch-based EndeavourOS (xcfe is the default DE so it's very well-supported).
Now, if you want something even more lightweight that's still Debian-based like Ubuntu, Mint et al., take a look at BunsenLabs Linux. It's blazing fast, extremely light and very user-friendly. It doesn't use a traditional desktop environment. Instead, it uses the Openbox window manager, which requires much less resources - especially RAM, which seems like it'll be the bottleneck on your laptop.
Apart from Ubuntu/Fedora (which are Snap/Flatpak heavy), I think you would be OK with any Linux distribution. I have a Intel Atom N270 and 2GiB of RAM happily running Debian Bookworm and KDE (with an SSD) your talking about something with far more power.
For me the considerations are as follows.
RAM
You've listed 4GiB of RAM, looking at my PC now (Debian Bookworm, KDE Desktop, 2 Flatpaks, Steam Store and Firefox ESR running), I am using 4.5GiB of RAM.
Moving to XFCE or LXDE would help you reduce the Desktop RAM usage to 400MiB-600MiB, but you'll still keeping hitting memory limits unless you install an addon to limit the number of tabs. Upgrading 8GiB in would resolve this weakness.
I get by on the Netbook limiting it to 3 tabs or steam.
Disk Storage
You've listed 500GiB of HDD Storage, this means you want to avoid any distribution which pushes Snaps/Flatpaks/Immutable OS because the amount of storage they require and loading that from a HDD would be insanely slow.
Similarly I would go for LXDE or KDE desktops, both are based on creating common shared system libraries so your desktop loads one instance of the library into memory and applications use it. As a result such desktops will quickly reach 1GiB of RAM but not increase much further.
Also moving from a HDD to SDD would give noticeable performance gains, the biggest performance bottleneck as far back as Core 2 Duo/Bulldozer CPU's was Disk I/O.
GPU
The biggest issue will be the 710M, I don't think NVidia's Wayland driver covers this era so you'll be stuck on X11. Considering the age of the GPU and the need for the proprietary driver, personally I would aim for Debian or OpenSuse the long release cycles mean you can get it working and it will stay that way.
From a desktop perspective, I would install KDE and if it was slow/tearing I'd switch to Mate desktop.
If you really need a DE then XFCE is your best choice, otherwise try out IceWM; it's the WM used by Antix Linux, so you know it's gonna be light.
Both XFCE and IceWM are know for customization, and both of them aren't the prettiest out of the box.
Forgive my beginner's-knowledgement but what is a WM?
WM means Window Manager, it mostly just manages window positions, tiling, decoration, and other Window related things. WMs usually need more configuration than DEs (Desktop Environments), some don't have default panels, widgets, etc. So you have to configure those yourself.
That allows them to be more customizable and lighter, but makes them a little harder to configure.
If you still want something lighter than XFCE you can try a window manager like dwm. It's really light and you can customize the entire things by modifying the source code. If you just wanna customize simple things (color, font, key binds, etc.) you can edit a neat little file called config.h
Hope this helps!
OP says
and doesn't mention that they are a C programmer or anything. It is extremely unlikely that OP
because it is extremely unlikely they would have any idea as to how to do such a thing. How many people, on earth, in total, can set up, run, and edit the source file of a tiling window manager? Now remove from that value those who are existing linux users. Functionally 0%.
This person wants to start using linux, is asking very simple questions. They are asking here which suggests they do not have a deep and rich existing network of people in their life to provide 1-on-1 support. Otherwise they'd ask one of their many sysadmin friends for individualized advice. You are suggesting to them something which takes a pretty wide diversity of skills and knowledge. And since the specific thing you are suggesting is a window manager, when they can't figure out how to use it, they will be unable to use their computer.
I wouldn't advise a beginner start with
vimon day 1, but at least if they did they'd still be able to use the computer for things other than text editing. And find a different text editor while they learnedvim.This is stunningly bad advice, verging on sabotage. Why do you want people to hate linux?