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?

1 point

Probably lxqt. https://lxqt-project.org/ Very lightweight yet a full-on DE (minus bells and whistles). Found on most Linux distros repositories.

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1 point

Yeah I’ll check LXQT. It’s been a long time since I thinkered with distros an DEs. Thanks

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1 point

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/

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6 points

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.

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1 point

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

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2 points

I love OB with tint2 and conky , no de needed.

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2 points

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

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1 point

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.

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1 point

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.

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3 points
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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.

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1 point

E

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