XFCE, best option for old laptop?

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Prankmaster

XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by Prankmaster »

I'm going to install Mint on my cousin's laptop tomorrow which its old (C2D and 2GB of RAM) and I was thinking about using XFCE since last time I checked it was less resource-hungry than Mate, but I'm not sure if it the laptop will be more agile with XFCE than with Cinnamon since I did test it with a liveUSB that used cinnamon and it ran pretty well.

Anyone knows?

Thanks
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jimallyn
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by jimallyn »

The available desktop environments for Mint, in increasing order of required resources, is XFCE, Mate, Cinnamon, KDE. If you're worried that the computer might not be powerful enough, you should probably stick with XFCE.
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by dXTC »

A Core 2 Duo laptop with 2Gb of RAM should be able to run Cinnamon pretty well, with one important caveat-- the video hardware. If the laptop's video chip is some off-brand or Intel integrated graphics and/or uses a shared video memory system (where part of that 2GB is shared with the video processor), you might want to consider XFCE. If it has AMD/ATI Radeon or NVidia, then I'd go for Cinnamon myself. If you want to identify the video hardware while in Linux, you can always open the Terminal window and type

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inxi -Fxz
I use both Cinnamon and XFCE, as is shown in my signature below. The Dell desktops are both C2Ds with dedicated Radeons, and run Cinnamon pretty well; the Optiplex ran Cinnamon halfway decently with the integrated Intel graphics before I could find a dedicated half-height card to install. The old Lenovo is an Intel Atom-based netbook, with an integrated graphics chip which shares video memory with the main memory; it runs noticeably better with XFCE.
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by Jeepty »

I have a small toshiba netbook. I have been switching back and forth between xfce and lmde2 for experimental reasons.

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CPU~Single core Intel Atom CPU N280 (-HT-) clocked at Min:1000.000Mhz Max:1333.000Mhz Kernel~3.19.0-18-generic i686 Up~10:13 Mem~347.8/2006.1MB SSD~60.0GB
I have also had cinnamon on this thing. On cinnamon, it was slow to load pages, docs, and everything else. However, the stock windows 7 was WAY worse. It took 4 minutes to boot. With xfce it is WAY snappier. browser loads quickly, docs load quickly, etc. I would recommend xfce for older computers like mine. I also tried Lubuntu on this little guy and it was very responsive. But it was lacking all the mint features and I just had to come back.

My vote, xfce for older laptop/hardware.
Prankmaster

Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by Prankmaster »

XFCE it is then

Thanks for the info guys!
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by phd21 »

Prankmaster wrote:I'm going to install Mint on my cousin's laptop tomorrow which its old (C2D and 2GB of RAM) and I was thinking about using XFCE since last time I checked it was less resource-hungry than Mate, but I'm not sure if it the laptop will be more agile with XFCE than with Cinnamon since I did test it with a liveUSB that used cinnamon and it ran pretty well.

Anyone knows?

Thanks
Hi Prankmaster,

I always tell people to create Live DVD's of each version and boot up to each one and try them.

FYI: I use Linux Mint 17.1 KDE on an older single core P4 2.4 ghz with only 2gb of ram, see post signature, and it works really well. I mean I wish I had newer faster hardware with more memory, etc ... But, LM17.1 KDE is working great on my system.
Phd21: Mint 20 Cinnamon & xKDE (Mint Xfce + Kubuntu KDE) & KDE Neon 64-bit (new based on Ubuntu 20.04) Awesome OS's, Dell Inspiron I5 7000 (7573) 2 in 1 touch screen, Dell OptiPlex 780 Core2Duo E8400 3GHz,4gb Ram, Intel 4 Graphics.
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by goetzkluge »

Prankmaster wrote:... but I'm not sure if it the laptop will be more agile ...
It is more agile, at least on the old computers which I tried. XFCE would be the right choice. (I use i3, but that is no option in the case described by you.)
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by Hoser Rob »

My experience with cinnamon indicates that when you boot the live iso, if it can't do the 3D hardware accel that DE needs, it'll tell you when it comes up.

Still, I think XFCE would run better in 2Gb.

The best way is to just DL all the MInt DE spin iso's except for LMDE ... nothing against lmde but it's based on debian and not really noob suitable IMO ... and try them yourself from a USB boot.
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by I2k4 »

I throw in with those suggesting you create a couple of Live USBs (assuming the machine has USB 2.0) and let your end user try them out. The user interfaces are different enough that a user's comfort level could be more important than some incremental performance. Cinnamon is more refined. If it runs poorly from a thumb drive it will run poorly from a hard drive also, since most of the OS runs from RAM. Live USB is an excellent introduction to the look and feel and how things work on a particular machine, without wasting time and effort on a full installation. My Dell laptop has 2gb of RAM, has XFCE installed on a 7200rpm hard drive and I often run Cinnamon from a thumb drive on it - hard to tell the difference - both run well.
Last edited by I2k4 on Wed Jun 10, 2015 9:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
TRUST BUT VERIFY any advice from anybody, including me. Mint/Ubuntu user since 10.04 LTS. LM20 64 bit XFCE (Dell 1520). Dual boot LM20 XFCE / Win7 (Lenovo desktop and Acer netbook). Testing LM21.1 Cinnamon and XFCE Live for new Lenovo desktop.
Dave B
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by Dave B »

Hi Prankmaster,

Having recently carried out a performance comparison of most Mint versions on older hardware, my findings may prove helpful?

Here's the link
Linux Mint Performance Comparison - Part 2 (updated)

Hope the install goes well, and your cousin enjoys Mint,
David
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by MtnDewManiac »

Prankmaster wrote:I'm going to install Mint on my cousin's laptop tomorrow which its old (C2D and 2GB of RAM) and I was thinking about using XFCE since last time I checked it was less resource-hungry than Mate
If you cannot find a DE that fits with the capabilities of the laptop from among the usual suspects, you could always run Synaptic Package Manager and pick LDXE, FVWM-crystal (just to name two at random), or one of the other "light" alternatives to the DEs that are offered as defaults in the various Mint .ISOs. IIRC, there are a number of them.

Regards,
MDM
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by formin »

for a old laptop; expert will tell you to give a try at a better distribution like symplis / antix / puppy .
i tryt xfce mint on kvm and i recommend xfce-mint because it works with 2 gb.
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by phd21 »

Hi Prankmaster & cousin,

So, I am curious as are others I'm sure, to find out what happened with you and your cousin's computer system which Linux Mint did your cousin decide on and are they happy with it?
Phd21: Mint 20 Cinnamon & xKDE (Mint Xfce + Kubuntu KDE) & KDE Neon 64-bit (new based on Ubuntu 20.04) Awesome OS's, Dell Inspiron I5 7000 (7573) 2 in 1 touch screen, Dell OptiPlex 780 Core2Duo E8400 3GHz,4gb Ram, Intel 4 Graphics.
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by benali72 »

Thanks for all the excellent info in this thread. I'll add I support a small flock of users on various brands of early-dual-core machines (dating from 2005 to 2009). All have 2 gig ram. We use Mint 17 32-bit with XFCE and are very happy with its snappy performance. For typical desktop use we find this configuration generally uses 300 to 800 kb of ram. When we tested the same with Mint 17 64-bit we found ram use climbed to 500 to 1000 kb of ram. We also randomly tested Cinnamon on some of the boxes. We found performance fine on some and not so good on others, due to different video hardware. Cheers.
justwally

Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by justwally »

I use Linux Mint 17 (64-bit) with XFCE on my desktop system (Core2 Duo w/4GB and Intel Integrated graphics). It is much snappier than the current Xubuntu...much. It isn't much, however, for playing videos. I mean, it's ok, but it can be laggy, and I mostly don't care about videos on the Internets. I run a music server on it and use it for my daily stuff just fine (going on a number of years, now). Clementine plays local MP3's flawlessly under most conditions.

The first time that you access the Programs Menu it will be a bit laggy popping up, and then it will pop right up every time after that in the same session.

Honestly, I cannot see a good reason to get rid of my Core2 Duo machine, it runs well enough.

I think it could be a good idea to give a 2GB machine a 4-6GB swap partition. Just in case. My machine never, ever has touched the swap partition, not even when it was running 32-bit Linux. If you can find a 4GB RAM solution, that machine will be good for a while.
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Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by acerimusdux »

I 100% agree with all those recommending XFCE, not only is it the fastest and most light on resources, it's also IMO as polished as any, and with good options to customize the look to your tastes. If you want a slicker look than the default, compositing is very easy to enable, and mostly trouble free.

I think the main thing with laptops is to keep in mind the default installation is geared towards the desktop. No matter which edition you chose, there are going to be things you can tweak to minimize power usage and maximize battery life and performance, and also possibly SSD life, on a laptop.

One thing I recommend is doing a search for your specific model, to find out any model specific hardware issues or tweaks. The Archlinux wiki will often have a page for a specific model with helpful information.

A few other things I suggest, once it's installed:

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sudo apt-get install  xfce4-goodies xfce4-mixer xubuntu-icon-theme
sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools powerstat powertop preload prelink
sudo apt-get install xbindkeys xbacklight xvkbd
The first line just adds a few more usefull XFCE specific options.
The laptop-mode-tools is almost essential for a laptop, will help reduce disk usage (automatically does many of the tweaks that you will see suggested for laptops and SSDs).
Preload will speed things up by making smarter use of your limited RAM (over time it will recognize your most commonly used programs and have them preloaded into RAM, making things seem very snappy).
The last line gives you some tools that will allow you to configure special laptop keys, such as for sound, screen brightness, etc., through an .xbindkeysrc file in the users home directory. You may have to serach for suggested configurations for your model.

On a laptop, especially older or lower end, I also personally prefer to replace mdm and xcreensaver with lightdm and light-locker. Don't see the point in the fancier graphics using up my limited battery power.

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sudo apt-get purge mdm xscreensaver xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-data
sudo apt-get install lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter light-locker light-locker-settings
To get light-locker to work well with xfce-power-manager, you have to make the right choices in light-locker-settings; mainly chose "enable, "when screensaver is deactivated", a very small delay (2 secs), and "lock on suspend" (and that should get suspend, lock screen, switch user all working).

There are other things you can consider, such as disabling most logging, especially if you are setting this up for a user who won't be looking at logs anyway.
hagey

Re: XFCE, best option for old laptop?

Post by hagey »

Hi acerimusdux,
The laptop-mode-tools is almost essential for a laptop, will help reduce disk usage (automatically does many of the tweaks that you will see suggested for laptops and SSDs).
Preload will speed things up by making smarter use of your limited RAM (over time it will recognize your most commonly used programs and have them preloaded into RAM, making things seem very snappy).
Do I assume correctly that by installing as you suggest, these programs run automatically or do you need to run a program and make tweaks?

Thanks,

hagey.
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