MikeFu84 Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 Going to start off by saying I have some experience using Linux but not a lot. I've used Red Hat before it became Fedora. Tried Fedora a few times as well as Ubuntu and Mint. I am here in search of a distro that will run smoothly on a laptop I own. I tried Mint (14) and it was very laggy on my again laptop. Specs of Laptop (Dell Inspiron 1300) 1.7GHz Intel Centrino 512MB Ram 60GB HDD 8MB Intel Graphics Just looking at some suggestions for something that will run smoothly on my aging hardware, so many possibilities my research has me going all over. Looking from responses from others that have had a similar experience that I am about to embark on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 If you want to get EXTRA performance out of that, you'd need something like gentoo and you'd have to configure all the build tools to your exact hardware... If on the other hand you want something that won't need to you know a hell of a lot about compiling, hardware, etc. then you'd be better off with any large linux distro and just not use KDE or Gnome, try LXDE and XFCE or Mate if you liked gnome 2.x Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simonlang Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 i would go for lubuntu in that case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grabageek Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 <- Is an OpenSuSE fan - I find it easy yet powerful - you may want to give it a spin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xahid Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 You should try Old Distro (even Mint) not newer for that hardware if you want to run Gnome. Try Xfce desktop, its lightweight. Xfce with Suse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max Norris Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 Had Xubuntu running on an old laptop of mine for a while, XFCE's not usually my thing but it actually looked and ran rather well. Personally one of the better desktops in the lightweight class, doesn't sacrifice too much in functionality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeFu84 Posted September 27, 2013 Author Share Posted September 27, 2013 I may try Mint XFCE. I have already tried Mint Cinnamon and it was painful. Will look into the Suse options, have always wanted to try one of those. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fusi0n Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 Arch Linux is sweet Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 Cinnamon is based upon GNOME3 and needs a full 3D card to work, plus even on decent hardware it actually still runs much worse than GNOME3. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mindovermaster Moderator Posted September 27, 2013 Moderator Share Posted September 27, 2013 Cinnamon is based upon GNOME3 and needs a full 3D card to work, plus even on decent hardware it actually still runs much worse than GNOME3. Cinnamon runs worse than GNOME? I thought cinnamon was a step down from GNOME as far as eyecandy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fusi0n Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 XFC works well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mindovermaster Moderator Posted September 27, 2013 Moderator Share Posted September 27, 2013 XFC works well. That's XFCE :rofl: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 Cinnamon runs worse than GNOME? I thought cinnamon was a step down from GNOME as far as eyecandy. Yes but for some reason even with a pretty decent graphics card and quad-core CPU, small things like dragging and resizing windows lags like hell in cinnamon but doesn't in GNOME3. My macbook runs OSX fine and GNOME3 on arch fine, but can only just run cinnamon on arch, fans run at top speed and the lag makes it pretty much unusable (in both 3D and forced 2D modes) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fusi0n Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 That's XFCE :rofl: :rofl: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeFu84 Posted September 27, 2013 Author Share Posted September 27, 2013 Ya I am running Mint 15 XFCE right now, posting from there. Seems to run well. Task Manager shows 132 processes and 30-45% CPU usage and ~50% memory usage. I am hoping I can tweak things a bit to bring those numbers down. Currently all default install with most recent updates installed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
COKid Posted September 27, 2013 Share Posted September 27, 2013 When I boot up Debian Wheezy with lxde as the DE, it runs at less than 100 mb of memory. That's with a core Debian install and the "lxde-core" meta-package, however. Much better than the 700-800 MB I get with a clean install of Windows 7. That being said, I tend to use Debian with xfce mostly, which seems to hover around 225 MB of RAM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mindovermaster Moderator Posted September 27, 2013 Moderator Share Posted September 27, 2013 I use XFCE on Debian Wheezy, too. With all my applications I run, I only use 1.4GB out of my 8GB. I'm guessing that XFCE as their main DE, that they put more into it than you would put in it if you installed it yourself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeFu84 Posted September 27, 2013 Author Share Posted September 27, 2013 When I boot up Debian Wheezy with lxde as the DE, it runs at less than 100 mb of memory. That's with a core Debian install and the "lxde-core" meta-package, however. Much better than the 700-800 MB I get with a clean install of Windows 7. That being said, I tend to use Debian with xfce mostly, which seems to hover around 225 MB of RAM. I use XFCE on Debian Wheezy, too. With all my applications I run, I only use 1.4GB out of my 8GB. I'm guessing that XFCE as their main DE, that they put more into it than you would put in it if you installed it yourself. Ya part of my problem may be I only have 512 in this laptop. It does have a open slot to add an additional module. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Growled Member Posted September 27, 2013 Member Share Posted September 27, 2013 I use XFCE on Debian Wheezy, too. With all my applications I run, I only use 1.4GB out of my 8GB. I'm guessing that XFCE as their main DE, that they put more into it than you would put in it if you installed it yourself. I tried Point Linux, which is based on Debian Wheezy. I really liked it but I would have kept it on my machine but I never could get ripped videos to encode properly with Handbrake. The audio was out of sync with the video. I never have this problem with other distros. I wondered if it had something to do with the new multimedia libs that Debian uses. On Ubuntu based distros it always just works. Just throwing that out there. Not asking for assistance since I've moved on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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