The dsektop environment really doesn't have anything to do with it. That's up to the video drivers and display server, be it X11 or Wayland. I haven't any idea which desktop might offer you the best tools for configuring those things though. Just as a rough guess, I'd guess KDE Plasma, perhaps XFCE?
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.
Open source software usually doesn’t do any kind of tracking or telemetry. Sometimes it is there but then it’s usually opt-in (off by default unless you change it). Most Linux distros contain a huge amount of open source software. So all the code is in the open (which means usually no shady things going on, because a lot of eyes are looking at that code) and there’s often not even an incentive for the developers to gain money directly from the users, except through donations. So if you really like some open source project, please do contribute or donate to it.
So in the end it doesn’t really matter which distro, they all will be MASSIVELY more privacy friendly than any closed source OS like Windows, OSX iOS, or proprietary Android, although to maximize your “chances” so to speak you can go for a purely community-run distro not backed by any company (Ubuntu is backed by Canonical, Fedora is backed by Red Hat, OpenSuSE is backed by SuSE, these are the three big distros with a commercial background. I’m not saying they do violate your privacy currently, but they at least have a greater tendency to do so, because data gathered can be sold, so it might be a business incentive for them. Ubuntu sent users’ search queries to Amazon in the past to gain some more money, but the community outrage caused them to remove this anti-feature afterwards again. Fedora is currently proposing to introduce opt-out (on-by-default) telemetry, it’s not decided yet, but it’s a bit worrying still. So you see, such distros might not be the best choice for “maximum” privacy. But compared to Windows or OSX they’re still magnitutes of miles ahead.
For community-run distros, you can check out e.g. Debian or Arch Linux, or any distro based upon them. For Debian specifially, I recommend running its “testing” branch, because it’s more up to date. Don’t worry about the label - it’s still rock solid stable, because Debian has very rigid testing requirements. They test more and longer than probably any other distro, which means Debian “stable” is very well tested, but also quite outdated. To alleviate that a bit, you can use the “testing” branch. You could even use the “unstable” branch for even more up to date packages, but there’s at least a chance that you get some package dependency problems every once in a while or so, so not recommended for a beginner. Debian is also quite easy to get into nowadays, though maybe not as easy as some of the Ubuntu-based distros. Linux Mint (normally Ubuntu-based) also has a Debian-based edition these days, and Linux Mint is a great distro for beginners. Arch is hard to get into but great for modern desktop usage or gaming because it’s always super up to date. You can also check out EndeavourOS, an Arch-based clone with easier installation. Or just use any distro, really, it’s not that big of a deal currently. They all behave quite well. Mint, Kubuntu or Fedora are good starting points for beginners.
If you have to use a public computer temporarily, there’s really only one choice for a private usage in that scenario: Tails. Put it on a USB stick and use it whenever you’re on an “unsafe” computer. Tails ensures that ALL traffic will be routed through Tor so no one on the local network (or the web, for that matter) can sniff out your data transfers, among other things it does to enable anonymous computer usage (e.g. it leaves behind no logs, doesn’t save any info about your previous sessions, and so on).
It’s a bad idea to recommend Debian Testing for people who have never run Linux before. Obviously people can do whatever they want, but the whole point of Debian stable is that it is stable, and the whole point of Testing is that it’s not.
Based on the ~2 videos I’ve seen, the newly released Debian 12 stable might actually be good for newbies without being noticeably out-of-date. Thanks to Flatpak etc, new software versions can be installed / updated easily without compromising stability.
The 710M will give you trouble. Like, pain in the ass. See if you can disable it in BIOS; you won’t be using it for “serious” gaming anyways.
Distro doesn’t much matter. It’s 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, that’s personal preference.
Note that if some piece of hardware (i.e. wifi) doesn’t work in one of them, it most likely won’t work in any distro.
It has the option of UEFI but the GeForce (I think) doesn’t support it.
This doesn’t make much sense to me. The GPU plays no role in that part of the boot process.
I’m 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.
You might see this suggestion twice - do a clean install, not just the OS. Back up your home directory and start fresh, move over what you need from the backup piecemeal so you can tell if something is causing issues.
Well, the Mint install was doing that from Fresh. More concerned with ubuntu cinnamon though as I prefer it. Both times I attempted an install on that were from freshly formatted drives and the only things I had installed was steam and discord. Still the only things I have installed really. First install was from a 22.04 iso image and then upgraded from the desktop to 23. Second attempt was with an actual 23 image. It was broken right out of the box.
Between a 1-5 second delay before anything internet related would start loading. So, I'd wait the 1-5 seconds and then it would actually start loading content.
Yeah, I think I'm throwing in the towel with ubuntu cinnamon. There are more and more bugs popping up now. I don't know how in the world it was so stable before and now it's a fucking mess.
So if that issue is still there on Mint I guess we're about to find out.
EDIT: And I'm back and the Mint issue persists. sigh
When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, it demonstrated it didn't know how to interact with open source communities. The Hudson -> Jenkins fork is probably the most famous where Oracle thought they could dictate where teams would collaborate. The bullying tone Oracle took made it clear they viewed the community as employees who should do as they are told.
To me this kind of fumble shows people in the Red Hat side are suffering the same issue, they don't understand they manage an ecosystem. Ironically if Oracle, Alma and Rocky work together they stand a good chance of owning that community.
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.
2.9GiB of that is Firefox,
~800MiB is Steam of which 550MiB is the Steam Store Web Browser.
~850MiB is the KDE desktop
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.
KDE has some GPU effects but is largely CPU drawn, it tends to look nice and work
Gnome 3 choses to use the GPU even when its less efficient so if it doesn't work well on KDE it won't on Gnome.
Mate is Gnome 2 and works smoothly on pretty much anything.
Cinnamon is Gnome 3
XFCE is like Mate is just works everywhere, personally I find Mate a more complete desktop.
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