I'm always amazed that any foreign government handling sensitive information or dealing with defence would consider using windows. Linux has been competent for all common tasks for a long time now and won't hold any hidden surprises.
/*
* Yeah, yeah, it's ugly, but I cannot find how to do this correctly
* and this seems to work. I anybody has more info on the real-time
* clock I'd be interested. Most of this was trial and error, and some
* bios-listing reading. Urghh.
*/
Another option is to buy a Chromebook, or look for a second hand several generation old Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X or Dell XPS Developer Edition. The latter is your best bet for not getting something underpowered, but also carries more risk of it breaking down sooner with no support possible. You might be able to find a first gen framework 13 second hand which can be fixed if something goes wrong, but it hasnāt been around so long that they are that cheap. Still someone might want to get rid of it and low ball it.
thank you for the recommendations. I'm fine with swapping OS's so even just compatible would work. The world seems awash in a million diffrrent laptops so it is a bit overwhelming!
For such an old system, your DE matters more than anything. Iād recommend XFCE, or even LXQT. Definitely upgrade your RAM though, thatāll give it a nice boost - DDR3 should be pretty cheap now. Any cheap SSD should be a big improvement as well.
Iāve got Zorin installed on my mumās PC (which is just as old as yours), and it works really well, even on a regular HDD.
I disagree, try running KDE on a 4th Gen i3 and compare it vs a modern system, the performance difference is pretty night-and-day. Itās not exactly unusable or anything, but it just doesnāt feel snappy and responsive, when compared to a lightweight DE on the same hardware.
I recommend installing Ventoy onto an USB thumbdrive and booting into some of your candidates. Since it boots from USB the performance isnāt 100% representative, but you can check if you get any driver issues and how the DEs āfeelā.
P.S. Eternity for Lemmy is making its first steps and was forked from Infinity for Reddit (I believe)
Your distro preferences donāt line up with your DE preferences at all. While you CAN install any DE on any distro, doing so often negates the point of using said distro in the first place.
Some KDE suggestions would be KDE Neon and Kubuntu, neither if which Iāve ever used, or openSUSE which I highly recommended.
The 710M will give you trouble. Like, pain in the ass. See if you can disable it in BIOS; you wonāt be using it for āseriousā gaming anyways.
Distro doesnāt much matter. Itās fully up to personal preferences. Try them all (using Ventoy like @b9chomps recommended. Some distros make the installation and management of the Nvidia driver easier than others but you should ideally be disabling that GPU entirely.
I personally recommend Fedora to newcomers but as I said, thatās personal preference.
Note that if some piece of hardware (i.e. wifi) doesnāt work in one of them, it most likely wonāt work in any distro.
It has the option of UEFI but the GeForce (I think) doesnāt support it.
This doesnāt make much sense to me. The GPU plays no role in that part of the boot process.
Iām planning to upgrade the RAM to 8 gigs and upgrade to an SSD
Get an SSD now. Even a dirt cheap one. 4GB is tenable with careful management but a hard drive will make everything excruciatingly slow, even on Linux.
i don't think my preferences line up with what you're after, so maybe ignore this. . . .
i'd recommend explaining computers youtube and website for beginners - he'll give you much better advice than me https://yewtu.be/channel/UCbiGcwDWZjz05njNPrJU7jA
but FWIW i reckon mint+xfce. will give you "easy" and "decent performance on old hardware"
you can try out the more flashy d.e s on a usb boot drive see if you think the features are worth it on your setup.
always remember it's easy and cheap to experiment.
get yourself a system for backing up your "home" directory, - a couple usb drives is easy enough.
and i'd also recommend starting a text file list of all programs/packages you like to install.
you can make it into a bash "sudo apt get " script (for debian based) if you're feeling super lazy.
, or just run through it manually whenever you switch.
also do the SSD upgrade as soon as you can afford it, it'll make everything a lot better
KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)
With 8 GB RAM and SSD, it should be plenty. Otherwise, Iād go with something else. XFCE is quite a solid experience, as I recall. No strong recommendations there, though. Iāve mostly used Cinnamon and KDE over the years.
Linux Mint is a classic choice. Positive: It has been recommended to newbies so much over so many years that there are tons of entry-level how-tos. Downside: Many of them are old and might be outdated by now. Be sure to always check whether the guide you are following is from 2010 or somethingā¦
Same really for all the Ubuntu distros. Kubuntu (=KDE+Ubuntu) worked fine for me.
Iāve read many people being very satisfied with Pop!_OS as well. Apparently, itās a good distribution if you want everything to already be set up for gaming for you. Havenāt used it myself, though.
EndeavourOS is the one Iām personally planning to use whenever I next install an OS. The distro and the surrounding community have a great reputation for being user-friendly and reliable.
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