Sucuk

christos , 11 months ago

Linuxmint with xfce. Light, stable, perfect.

CheshireSnake , 11 months ago

I’d go with a “light” DE for now, or a WM if possible (although it’s very different from windows). Your laptop isn’t bad - it’s actually better than mine (i3 with no discrete gpu), but i added 8gb ram (now it’s 12gb total) and it was a game-changer.

Imo, Mint or Debian is okay if you don’t want to stray far from Windows but your choice of DE is pretty limited with a small amount of ram. Maybe use xfce?

Also check out antix, puppy linux, or lubuntu. Those might be better choices while you haven’t upgraded your memory. Idk much about dual boot since I use Linux alone on my laptop or vm on my desktop.

epocsquadron , 11 months ago

Linux can definitely make that thing fly, although the biggest limitation will be RAM - not from the desktop environment you choose, but from the web, depending on how many and what kinds of websites you rely on (for example I regularly use 20-30GB of my 64 through figma, pitch, Google docs, notion, ClickUp, and sites I develop that tend to be video and image heavy). Were I you, I would prioritize the 8Gb ram upgrade.

Aside from that, which distro you choose won’t make a huge difference. Some claim desktop environments like gnome and kde plasma are too heavy (I assume they mean in graphics processing and ram usage) and will insist on something like xfce or sway. Those are invariably very fiddly to set up, so if you’re a beginner, I would recommend sticking with gnome or kde despite. These will be the default on the distros you mentioned. Mint MATE edition would be your best bet for a classic desktop environment that might tick the “lighter” check mark if you really must.

SFaulken , 11 months ago

I'd probably drop openSUSE Tumbleweed with LXQt on it. But that's my preference for low-spec machines. There's any number of distros with "lightweight" GUI's that you can use. XFCE/MATE/LXQt probably being the ones that will give you the least headaches.

Limitless_screaming , 11 months ago

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.

Beastie , 11 months ago

I agree 110% with everyone that is mentioning your DE is going to be an important choice. I run Tumbleweed, and moved from KDE (which I love for its customization and effects) to Enlightment, and I've seen the load (measure of how busy my system is) go from an average of 8 or 9, down to 2 or 3. Any distribution can be configured to be using minimal resources if you spend the time, if you want minimal out of the box, there are many that have that option too, but your DE is going to affect your performance a lot more than any minimally setup OS. That being said, Chrome and having lots of tabs open is going to kill your memory usage...

NateSwift , 11 months ago

I would try and avoid GNOME and KDE desktop environments. Also would recommend avoiding Zorrin. It was one of the first distros I used and it wasn’t very stable and software compatibility was rubbish.

Mint is really good out of box, and if Cinnamon is too heavy they have an iso that ships with xfce which is a lot lighter (and uglier imo)

smallaubergine , 11 months ago

Here's a good resource: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/window_manager

Limitless_screaming , 11 months ago

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.

IceTree , 11 months ago

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!

elscallr , 11 months ago

As far as a Desktop Environment goes take a look at XFCE. It's gtk based so will run all the Gnome style apps and look pretty, it's super lightweight, and infinitely customizable.

If you're keen on an Ubuntu flavor, the Xubuntu comes with it bundled. You can get it on any other distro, too, though.

density , 11 months ago

OP says

I am a beginner

and doesn't mention that they are a C programmer or anything. It is extremely unlikely that OP

can customize the entire things by modifying the source code

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 vim on 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 learned vim.

This is stunningly bad advice, verging on sabotage. Why do you want people to hate linux?