Suppose you’ve got an old PC - for arguments sake, assume a late 2000s PC with only 2GB RAM - which DE would you choose?
Note that whilst a simple WM + some lightweight apps might be a better option, to keep things simple, I’m limiting this poll to just DEs - and too ones which are still being maintained.
Also, in case you’ve voted for a non-obvious/“other” option, I’m curious to hear about your experiences on running that DE on an old machine - and why you’ve selected it over the more obvious choices.
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xfce is fine, generally for most things.
From my experience it’s barely lighter than KDE. LXQT/LXDE destroy it in every benchmark and in every test I’ve tried.
It’s about 300mb lighter than KDE in my experiences. On 2gb of RAM, that makes a difference. Sure, going LXDE is gonna be fine too; but it lacks a lot of the polish that XFCE has. I honestly like both for different things.
It’s about 300mb lighter than KDE in my experiences. On 2gb of RAM, that makes a difference.
And both LXDE and LXQT use half as much RAM as Xfce.
LXDE is gonna be fine too; but it lacks a lot of the polish that XFCE has. I honestly like both for different things.
I’d rather be able to open more than 5 tabs than have a fancy UI. That’s why Xfce is on my newer devices, and I install those 2 whenever someone needs an ancient laptop revived.
It depends on what you are doing. KDE is not as clean and light weight
The point is that LXQT and LXDE use half as much ram as Xfce. I’m not saying OP should use KDE.
From my experience, while LXQt uses ~20-25% less RAM than XFCE, it runs way faster and uses less CPU than XFCE.
On a machine with 2 GB of RAM, what is going to make the biggest difference is using a 32 bit distro. Everything, not just the desktop environment but also all the apps, is going to take about half as much RAM. At 2 GB, that takes your system from functionally useless to quite useful ( especially if you plan to open a web browser ).
There is an option you did not list that impressed me recently. Trinity is a desktop environment that is essentially modern KDE 3.
The 32!bit edition of Q4OS makes it easy to install Trinity. It is basically Debian under the hood so you get access to all those packages ( at least the ones available on 32 but ).
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Antix linux does great “de” with icewm
Ditto. Running antix on my netbook and I think icewm had the lowest resource usage of the defaults.
Puppy linux (debian version), small, light, 32b.
This. It worked smooth on eeepcs back in the days.
Surprised how many others are gravitated toward iceWM as I am… though I daily drive MATE
Seems perfect for a functional desktop with minimal idle CPU usage. It had come to my mind again as a perfect pair for the open source e-ink display.
Glad to see XFCE is in the lead. I’ve loved that DE for years.
I’d try AntiX with iceWM, but you could try MX with Xfce too. I guess your old PC is 32bits, both distro support it. I installed MX 32 bits on a old atom 32 bits, it works fine
Running mxlinux on an old pc here, and I recommend it heavily. It’s a lightweight system that is also user friendly for people new to linux.
MX is just fine, I wouldn’t ever hesitate to use it. I’ve loved SuSe since the chameleon sold me back in the 90’s, but MX is my fallback/goto distro now.
i3 isn’t a proper DE, though, but I definitely would go with that with that little RAM.
For strictly DEs, I’d pick XFCE - it’s just lovely for what it demands.
Same. i3wm first, or XFCE for a “real” DE.
I am currently running a debloated i3wm rig based on EndeavourOS/Arch and I really enjoy the low mental load of a truly minimal desktop. Only luxury I’ve allowed myself is CLI colors. I’m not ready for B&W yet.
LXDE/LXQT would be better choice in terms of resources usage but it lacks a lot of polish. So, my vote goes to XFCE
I have a laptop of that era (2008 HP Pavilion, Athlon64x2, 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD). It runs the Trinity Desktop Environment, which works just as well now as it did when that laptop was a flagship machine. (Updating a Gentoo system running on a machine that old is a bit time-consuming, mind you, but that isn’t the DE’s fault.)
I’ve tried several of the other lighter-weight DEs—XFCE, LXDE, Lumina, Gnome2 before it became MATE—but TDE does what I need it to do, and (just as importantly) the development team prefers to work on features and compatibility rather than tearing out things that still work or forcing new paradigms that don’t really make sense for my use case onto me. It’s there, it’s solid, and I’ve already learned its quirks, so I can save my brain cells for learning useful features in other programs rather than having to figure out where the control for some bit of the GUI ran off to this time. Why would I use anything else? The thing I want most from my DE is for it to stay out of the way and not keep me from using other software.
(Plus, Konqueror may no longer be useful as a web browser, but it’s still a better file manager than, say, Thunar, which I found to be a pain in the arse when I tried XFCE.)
i feel like if youre putting it on an old thing, you wanna go super small in order to keep up with new software demands. Damn small linux, puppy linux are the way to go
i still have an early 90s desktop that i have running that i mostly use to look at pdfs while im cooking, lol
Enlightenment is easily the lightest full DE. It is my recommendation.
Also, search craigslist. People here at least, always have old RAM for free or cheap. Or even check AliExpress, I picked up 4 gigs of samsung RAM for $18 through Ali
My PC with 4GB of RAM and an HDD is barely holding with linux mint. Tbf Mint isn’t the problem, it only takes 32% of ram compared to the 60+% of a debloated windows 10. It’s the other apps. Running a browser along anything else and Linux mint starts to struggle, even the built-in apps like the file manager and the text editor feel like they’re gonna crash the computer at any moment because of the random freezing/ delays.
My advice would be to try upgrading to 4GB and installing an SSD. Your old computer will likely only support SATA SSDs, which have a max speed of 500MB/s, but it’s far better than the 30MB/s at best that the HDD disks give.
There us no reason in 2024 to use a HDD as the boot drive.
Unless it’s all you have. Speaking as someone that’s at times been poor af, sometimes people just have to cobble up a frankensystem from whatever parts they can scrounge.
One of the things I love about linux is that it makes this reasonably possible.
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LQXT. Its both good looking and lightning fast.
