Distro for weak laptop?

uncle_rufus · 29 Jan 2014 at 09:53

Hey all,

I've got an aging laptop at home which has seen better days and I think the best thing for it is going to be to wipe windows off it completely and re-install... Question is what to go with?

It's not the most powerful laptop so I'm worried about going with too-fancy a window manager (compiz, cinammon etc). It has a relatively old 1st or 2nd gen i3, no dedicated GPU either. Here's my quick thoughts:

- Maybe Mint XFCE?
- Manjaro looks sort of interesting
- I've heard a lot of love for Crunchbag

Tempted to give SteamOS a quick try first as well, though I'm sure the laptop itself won't be able to run any native titles well or at all, I'm on the streaming beta and would love to see if a weak machine can stream anything decent if I plug it in wired temporarily

Any thoughts?

uncle_rufus · 29 Jan 2014 at 11:08

I should probably add I don't need the machine to do much more than browse the net and watch youtube/twitch videos and streams... I guess I might use it for some minor programming stuff but really I have my main PC for any non-casual usage... And I might just generally use it for messing about with things. I am an experienced Linux user so I don't have a problem with the more awkward distros and I'm totally cool with a lot of command-line

uncle_rufus · 29 Jan 2014 at 17:59

Interesting...

I think I can't resist giving SteamOS a quick try first... mostly to see how the streaming works and to see if I can get an HTPC style XBMC SteamOS hybrid going...

Once I break that I'll think about what to go for next

uncle_rufus · 29 Jan 2014 at 20:48

Sadly I cannot seem to get SteamOS to install as my laptop is under the requirements... But fear not!!! I will still someday give it a try with a proper HTPC

uncle_rufus · 9 Feb 2014 at 22:55

acme15 said:
An i3 will handle anything. I came in here expecting you to have a Pentium M solo core and 128MB of RAM or something.

Haha those were the days

Now that I think about it the thread title is a little bit of a misnomer - I guess at the time of writing the laptop felt kinda weak given it was a Dell model stuffed to the brim with their crap-ware... running pretty nicely now with Debian

I even found that if I install the Steam client I can still use the streaming features, and they seem to work okay - I did a write up of my first impressions playing about with it in the official SteamOS thread over in the PC games section or wherever it is

uncle_rufus · 19 Feb 2014 at 22:00

Probably something like crunchbang I reckon, or Lubuntu... The key is to go as lightweight as possible, and I would say specifically make sure you get a very light window manager (XFCE maybe?) because that will take up the least resources - which you'll want for running your browser etc.