Hello there. I’m a beginner so keep that in mind. I have an old laptop (something like 10 yo). It has an HDD, 4 gigs of DDR3, an i3 4th gen 1.7
GHz and an NVidia Geforce 710M (Windows Game Ready Driver 391.35 WHQL which I think doesn’t support Wayland). It also has CSM BIOS so yeah. It has the option of UEFI but the GeForce (I think) doesn’t support it.

Currently, it has Windows 10 on it, but it has been veeeeery sluggish. I’m planning to upgrade the RAM to 8 gigs and upgrade to an SSD, but (even if I upgrade those parts) I don’t want to use Windows anymore, at all.

So, I have a few options. (kinda in order)

Linux Mint
Fedora, though idk if the 2 GHz requirement is a big problem
Pop!_OS
MX Linux
Debian
Ubuntu and its flavors
Zorin OS
and maybe Solus? though the same problem with fedora.

Yeah yeah ik, all of these except Fedora and Solus are Debian/Ubuntu based.

DE options: (again, also kinda in order)

KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)
Cinnamon
XFCE - LXDE - LXQT (because of “lightweightness” :D)
Budgie
5. GNOME too heavy
These are some options for me. If you have any more suggestions, let me know. Also, are there any compatibility issues with my system for the distros/DEs?

Thanks for the replies in advance.

(Note: this was also posted in the m/linux@kbin.social magazine and the r/linux4noobs subreddit. don’t ask why im still on reddit, it’s because of Infinity for reddit.)

(Another note: If you saw this post before, it’s because of /kbin’s issues. I reposted it because no one saw it before.)

  • @noundus@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
    3•10 months ago

    I strongly recommend XFCE if you can’t upgrade. It’s the snappiest of the easy DEs, and on a 10yo laptop, I suspect you’ll notice. LXQT is half a tier more difficult, depending on how much you want to tweak the work flow.

    If for some reason XFCE is still too heavy and slow, you can go lighter than LXQT without giving yourself a headache, but the only true beginner openbox distro I know of is Mabox, and you seem to prefer point release distros.

    Edit: You know what though? Try KDE first; if it’s fast enough for you, great!