Keeping my laptop alive for online school

[vawa.id]

The spec of my laptop:

Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU B830 @ 1.80GHz   1.80 GHz

4 GB of RAM, 120 GB SSD

Currently running windows 10 just fine.

 

I want to install linux mint, but I'm not sure which version. I plan to run zoom and microsoft teams, browser, office, and gimp for light editing.

Which one should I consider installing?

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Windows 10 will run like ass on a system like that

 

My dad has a craptop with w10 aswell and its slow as shit, though you do get used to it being slow

 

It runs ok ish but obv not optimally cause w10 with its bloatware and garbage, but tolerable if youve gotten used to it

[Slottr]

Mate is the lightest out of the options. 

[Gamer4714]

If you need a nice user interface, you can install one of these

Zorin OS

Elementary OS

Garuda Linux

Ubuntu(if you're planning on using different skins/themes)

Although if you're going for garuda linux turn off some ui graphics settings.

If you plan to stick to Windows, use the windows 10 ameliorated. It would run almost as fast the linux distros. The ameliorated version is just windows, with no bloatware, no telemetry and other stuff.

[Bombastinator]

42 minutes ago, Gamer4714 said:

If you need a nice user interface, you can install one of these

Zorin OS

Elementary OS

Garuda Linux

Ubuntu(if you're planning on using different skins/themes)

Although if you're going for garuda linux turn off some ui graphics settings.

If you plan to stick to Windows, use the windows 10 ameliorated. It would run almost as fast the linux distros. The ameliorated version is just windows, with no bloatware, no telemetry and other stuff.

This ameliorated windows sounds like only good things.  There has to be a reason everyone isn’t using it.  I want it already.

[Guest]

You should try Xubuntu. It`s very lightweight compared to windows. If you are insisted on using Linux Mint then use MATE or XFCE version.

[Alexeygridnev1993]

Zoom MS Teams, and Gimp are available on Linux natively (yes, even Teams :)). MS Office is not, so you're stuck with Libreoffice  Google Docs or Office 365 online (none of which is a horrible option actually, in my experience).

 

Given your constraints of CPU and RAM, I would not recommend anything heavier than Lubuntu (Ubuntu with LXQt desktop environment). It will save you several hundred megabytes of RAM compared to other desktop environments.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

Zoom MS Teams, and Gimp are available on Linux natively (yes, even Teams :)). MS Office is not, so you're stuck with Libreoffice  Google Docs or Office 365 online (none of which is a horrible option actually, in my experience).

 

Given your constraints of CPU and RAM, I would not recommend anything heavier than Lubuntu (Ubuntu with LXQt desktop environment). It will save you several hundred megabytes of RAM compared to other desktop environments.

Ram is not really a problem.I use GNOME 3 with only 2gb of ram and it runs good enough. Also Lubuntu is horrible ever since they switched to Lxqt

[Alexeygridnev1993]

2 hours ago, WickedThunder86 said:

Ram is not really a problem.I use GNOME 3 with only 2gb of ram and it runs good enough. Also Lubuntu is horrible ever since they switched to Lxqt

What's its reported RAM usage on your computer, I wonder? On my machines, it always reported over 1 Gb, which I found absolutely ridiculous.

[Bombastinator]

1gb.  There was a time when there were mainframes running Unix for multiple hundreds of users that didn’t even have a whole gigabyte of slow storage, let alone memory.  Maybe there’s a BSD around that’s even smaller than small linuxes

[Giganthrax]

I have an old laptop with similar specs, and Linux Mint Mate works pretty well on it.

 

ZorinOS Lite is also great. 

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

What's its reported RAM usage on your computer, I wonder? On my machines, it always reported over 1 Gb, which I found absolutely ridiculous.

On idle it is around 600-800 MB

[Bombastinator]

37 minutes ago, WickedThunder86 said:

On idle it is around 600-800 MB

That’s actually getting kinda close to bingo for a modern machine but even if you hit zero it won’t crash.  You’ll just be introduced to a whole new level of slow.

[LBrocato]

On 7/24/2021 at 11:59 PM, vawa.id said:

The spec of my laptop:

Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU B830 @ 1.80GHz   1.80 GHz

4 GB of RAM, 120 GB SSD

Currently running windows 10 just fine.

 

I want to install linux mint, but I'm not sure which version. I plan to run zoom and microsoft teams, browser, office, and gimp for light editing.

Which one should I consider installing?

their better open source programs then ones listed. you got low specs. you rather install tiny core if  Linux mint(xfce) runs slow . I have Intel Gold Pentium processors and 8gb of ram and it runs fine on Linux mint (cinnamon) edition. I also have Fedora 34 on i3 and 4gb of ram.Fedora 34 (cinnamon) edition is running great. This is what i run daily. Fedora (lxqt)or (xfce) could work too. the only different is mostly for workstation and is more bleeding edge. where is Linux  mint to stable but packages can  be a little old.  use the offical distro  package installer, the snap package installer  which is not offical support by most distros are not up to date.  By install snap packages on linux mint you break your machine they have ban the installl of snap packages 

 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

That’s actually getting kinda close to bingo for a modern machine but even if you hit zero it won’t crash.  You’ll just be introduced to a whole new level of slow.

Atleast it's better than Windows 11. it takes more than 2gb of ram on idle

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, WickedThunder86 said:

Atleast it's better than Windows 11. it takes more than 2gb of ram on idle

Haven’t tried win11 yet. My experiences with win10 weren’t great when I updated.  It killed my good monitor. I still wish I could get win 8.1 back.  I’d have to give up GoG though.  Argh.

Edited July 26, 2021 by Bombastinator

[OldTweaker]

4Gb and an ssd, you should be fine with Linux Mint. Mate is indeed the lightest of the Mint options. Ubuntu Mate may be a bit lighter, but you may not like the UI. There are lighter UIs to be found, but with 4 Gb you should still be fine. 

As to the suggestion to use BSD and the remark that Unix used to run on much lower specs. That's true, but the issue isn't so much the OS or even the UI. The performance hit these days is largely due to websites having the UI run in the browser and not serverside (thank you Javascript...). You can optimize till you're blue in the face, in the end the demand of the websites is what will feed the demand for more power. Choosing a light UI such as Mate will give you a little more memory but don't expect miracles. Choosing BSD will not give you noticeable extra performance if at all. 

A tip on MS Teams: this is a very demanding app. Doesn't seem like your laptop has a discrete GPU. So the best tip is to: 'Disable GPU hardware acceleration' in the settings of MS Teams. Seems counter intuitive, but GPU hardware acceleration only works well with discrete GPUs and will kill performance with integrated GPUs
Also tip from someone that learned the hard way: make sure the fans of the laptop are clean. Seriously, something people often ignore, but it makes a ton of difference to prevent throttling. Made that mistake myself on a beefy laptop that made a ton of noise when Teams was running and became sluggish. Just cleaning the fans made it behave again
 

[Alexeygridnev1993]

4 hours ago, WickedThunder86 said:

On idle it is around 600-800 MB

Right; so, it seems, GNOME hogs as much memory as available to the system, so, if there's a lot of RAM, it will consume more...

[10leej]

On 7/26/2021 at 3:16 AM, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

Right; so, it seems, GNOME hogs as much memory as available to the system, so, if there's a lot of RAM, it will consume more...

Gnome isn't that bad on memory these days. It traded that for CPU usage.

[Bombastinator]

On 7/26/2021 at 12:15 AM, LBrocato said:

their better open source programs then ones listed. you got low specs. you rather install tiny core if  Linux mint(xfce) runs slow . I have Intel Gold Pentium processors and 8gb of ram and it runs fine on Linux mint (cinnamon) edition. I also have Fedora 34 on i3 and 4gb of ram.Fedora 34 (cinnamon) edition is running great. This is what i run daily. Fedora (lxqt)or (xfce) could work too. the only different is mostly for workstation and is more bleeding edge. where is Linux  mint to stable but packages can  be a little old.  use the offical distro  package installer, the snap package installer  which is not offical support by most distros are not up to date.  By install snap packages on linux mint you break your machine they have ban the installl of snap packages 

 

Fedora is still red hat though right? So some very different command structures.  Might not matter in this case. 

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, 10leej said:

Gnome isn't that bad on memory these days. It traded that for CPU usage.

@OldTweaker has a point.  If you can handle gnome in any way the BSD concept is pointless.   KDE is lighter weight than gnome if you need something lighter than gnome.  Lighter weight also often means  fewer features though. Maybe too few.  Basically all computers alive today have a point in time where they would have been “wow that’s fast” but stuff of varying types has risen to meet them so putting something in racing trim doesn’t mean it can handle outside stuff. 

[10leej]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

Fedora is still red hat though right? So some very different command structures.  Might not matter in this case. 

what's wrong with that?

 

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

@OldTweaker has a point.  If you can handle gnome in any way the BSD concept is pointless.   KDE is lighter weight than gnome if you need something lighter than gnome.  Lighter weight also often means  fewer features though. Maybe too few.  Basically all computers alive today have a point in time where they would have been “wow that’s fast” but stuff of varying types has risen to meet them so putting something in racing trim doesn’t mean it can handle outside stuff. 

KDE has wore feature's than any any other desktop. The QT toolkit is just lighter weight that gtk, the trade is that gtk 4 has gpu acceleration built in, where kde had to bake that into kwin.

[Bombastinator]

Re: what is wrong with that? 
 

maybe nothing.  Red hat is different though.  It uses some different formats for things.  Also Had an iffy rep when I was dealing with it because there was one guy in that company that insisted on using stuff he specifically wrote that a lot of people thought was worse than what was already there. That whole “system D” thing.  That bit is Probably no longer relevant stuff.  System D might have gone away or been incorporated into everything. 

[10leej]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

Re: what is wrong with that? 
 

maybe nothing.  Red hat is different though.  It uses some different formats for things.  Also Had an iffy rep when I was dealing with it because there was one guy in that company that insisted on using stuff he specifically wrote that a lot of people thought was worse than what was already there. That whole “system D” thing.  That bit is Probably no longer relevant stuff.  System D might have gone away or been incorporated into everything. 

Redhat still is POSIX compliant there's really no unique command structure. Basically you just need to figure out firewallD and SELinux both of whick are pretty straight forward in my experience.

 

There's really no relevant argument for "why not use systemd" for enterprise. systemd services and timers are far superior (from a simplicity standpoint) and reliable compared to cron and init scripts.

Really the only argument that can be made is for the minimal instalations for iot of which that space is irrelevant to this debate.

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, 10leej said:

Redhat still is POSIX compliant there's really no unique command structure. Basically you just need to figure out firewallD and SELinux both of whick are pretty straight forward in my experience.

 

There's really no relevant argument for "why not use systemd" for enterprise. systemd services and timers are far superior (from a simplicity standpoint) and reliable compared to cron and init scripts.

Really the only argument that can be made is for the minimal instalations for iot of which that space is irrelevant to this debate.

Not interested in trying to revive the system D argument.  At least one person liked it or he wouldn’t have written it.  No one I ever spoke to about it liked it but it had to have fans.  Old dusty stuff anyway.

 

”really no unique” is different than “no”.  my memory was the stuff that was different wasn’t incomprehensibly different than other linuxes.  There are still unixes being used that were more different. That ibm one comes to mind though it’s name escapes me.

Edited July 27, 2021 by Bombastinator