What's the best light desktop env to install in a Linux distro?
What's the best light desktop env to install in a Linux distro?
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?
What's the best light desktop env to install in a Linux distro?
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
I usually go with Xfce.
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
I'm running Kubuntu on less than that on a desktop and it works just fine.
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...
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.
LXQt, XFCE Or a window manager, they’re all lightweight.
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.
I think gnome and KDE Plasma are just too heavy. And I would use a WM if it was for me, in fact that what I use in my daily driver but it is for someone not that tech savvy. I may check one from the alternative crowd tho. Thanks for the answer
plasma is surprisingly performant
I seem to remember hearing about Plasma having similar memory usage to XFCE. Don’t quote me on that lol
Try KDE Plasma, you can strip out a ton of it, for example XOrg entirely, baloo, animations, etc.
OP asked for desktop env, and tiling window managers are... Well only window managers and not desktop environments...
I like MATE. It feels familiar. (I’m a GNOME user 😅)
- the alternative crowd: Mate, Cinnamon, Regolith
Middle tier too.
not sure, if cinnamon still qualifies as alternative considering the massive Linux Mint crowd.
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.
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
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)
I would go mx linux fluxbox
Moksha Desktop environment Bodhi Linux
Or Fedora Budgie Edition
I love OB with tint2 and conky , no de needed.
If it was for me I could use something like that. But I don't think the person I'll give the pc to would be able to lol
Could you tell me what would be lacking? There's a surprising amount of bells and whistle s you can add to the setup. Check out bunsenlabs distro for an example.
I think what you need is LXQT in that case. It's light while still being a DE.
If it's for someone else, I'd pick Mate or XFCE. Should feel familiar to Windows (which is what I'd guess they're coming from), and it should be light enough to work on that hardware.
ElementaryOS comes with Pantheon, which is also very light, iirc, and it might be worth trying out via a live ISO.
Xfce, LXQt or just install JWM and enjoy the 30 Mb idle RAM usage
There are many options, but I'd say on those specs anything will run more or less fine with some tweaks/settings.
Personally I would go with KDE Plasma, because I feel most comfortable with it. It can be pretty light on system ressources when configured properly. Disable all the visual stuff (animations, blur, anti aliasing) and some of it's background modules (baloo and some other stuff that you personally don't need).
But you should take the one you are familiar with and find out how you can tweak it to be more light. Cheers
I have tested KDE plasma in my main pc for a few weeks now and the ram consumption seems pretty high and have too many options. I'm looking for something light and easy to use (not many options) since the pc is going to be used by someone not very tech savvy.
Measuring RAM usage is extremely tricky, because programs will use more than they need, if there is lots of unused RAM available. Check out https://www.linuxatemyram.com if you want to learn more.
For me KDE Plasma uses over a gig on my main PC after a fresh boot. But it also ran perfectly fine on a 512MB ancient laptop.
Xfce
LXQt, XFCE, Maté, TDE. Any of them will do. Which you choose depends on personal preference and how large an ecosystem you want—LXQt has only a few basic applications, TDE has pretty much everything that was in KDE3, the others are somewhere in between.
Probably lxqt. https://lxqt-project.org/ Very lightweight yet a full-on DE (minus bells and whistles). Found on most Linux distros repositories.
Yeah I'll check LXQT. It's been a long time since I thinkered with distros an DEs. Thanks
By the way, you might also investigate window managers, which aren't as full-featured as DE's but are even lighter on resources. Back in the day before KDE and Gnome, I used Window Maker , which is based on Steve Job's NextStep's UI. Only works with X, not Wayland, though. https://www.windowmaker.org/
You could try Niri. I have tested it with a ~10 year old notebook with a 1st gen Core i5 cpu.
But, even newest Gnome runs smooth on this machine.
Does Xfce count as light? It's got plenty of features. Should fit in 4gb well enough though.
If xfce doesnt count as light I don't know what would
Well when I used tu it like 12 years ago it was very light. I'll have to check now. Thanks for the answer
Your biggest problem is going to be the 4 GB of RAM. Saving a few hundred megs on the DE will help but not much. If you run a web browser ( and I cannot imagine using a computer without one ) that RAM is going to fill up fast.
Honestly, I would use a 32 bit distro on that hardware.
Q4OS with Trinity, Antix, Adelie, and DSL are all pretty decent options.
Zram
What's wrong with 4Gb? It works fine for light usage and you can enable swap to a SSD for when you want something a little memory hungry like a lot of tabs.
I used a system with 6 GB daily until not long ago. I had to constantly restart my web browsers to reclaim memory. RAM was a constant issue. A 32 bit distro made things a lot better.
XFCE or LxQT but i have a preference for XFCE if it is for normal use.
Same. Mostly because I used to run XFCE some years ago, but I might give LXQT a try. Thanks
Does not answer your question, and someone already mentioned it in a thread, but don't forget zram when only 4GBs are available.
E
river or sway
That's a reasonable machine. You probably could use anything but if you want lighter weight you could use Xfce4. If it is a laptop you could use stock gnome with some swap as a backup to prevent OOM
For something with that little memory, I would use a minimal window manager; you'll want every megabyte of memory if you want to have any chance at running something like a javascript-capable browser without constantly hammering swap. fvwm, cwm, jwm, and ratpoison are all small window managers I enjoy; but do your own research into what window manager is the best for you.
Is the A6 from 2017/18? Should be fine with anything. My wife's laptop is from 2010/11. I tried all the DEs because of the lightness claims, I found GNOME worked the best, and it is super peppy running NixOS.
I asked online why GNOME would perform better than what is assumed a lighter DE, and a comouter dude says GNOME goes and gets everything it needs and caches it when you launch something so retrieval is faster in the app, KDE loads stuff on demand as it is asked for so a alow CPU and HDD hinderes KDE for me.
if you can afford it, by 4 more gigs of RAM
Get an SSD as it will make your life way better
I did that later but this laptop only supports SATA II speeds so it helped, but isn't game changing like it would be on SATA III speeds
I have a thumb drive with Mint Mate installed on it and it runs fine on a 4gb i5 - 3rd gen.
honestly they are all pretty good at this point. start with the default ur distro supports. if that isn't to your taste try kde/plasma, gnome or lxde
I'd go with XFCE
I recently bought netbook on AMD c50 for 20$ and firstly, i bought some ram and ssd, luckily ddr3 is very cheap, one or two 8gb sodimm modules and 256gb ssd, or in my case 360gb because price was the same when i ordered them, 360gb was even slightly cheaper, so what i was trying to say, this small cheap upgrade will make a world of difference, and when they'll arrive I'm planning to install "tumbleweed kde" , whole cost of upgrade is 8$ for one module of 8gb ddr3 sodimm, and 17$ for 360gb ssd, 256gb price was the same as i said before
In my experiments with a similar setup and integrated graphics, full-wayland Kubuntu feels much more responsive than Xorg-Lubuntu, for what it's worth
Moksha Heck, just install Bodhi Linux 7, your choice between Ubuntu based or Debian based.
Ironically, ChromeOS Flex would run smooth on those specs, since it does so on my dogshit Samsung Chromebook 3 with shittier specs.
What the hell is that monstrosity?
ChromeOS. It’s relatively simple, secure and runs on older hardware.
If the PC has an SSD, install anything you want, the PC will handle it fine.