Spec me a Linux Distro for my wife's laptop

spudbynight

spudbynight

spudbynight

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I'm thinking about installing Linux on my wife's laptop.

It is a Dell XPS l501x

It has a Core i5 480m which runs at 2.66 Ghz. Nvidia GT420 graphics.

At the moment it runs Windows 8.1 but she is having issues with it being rather sluggish. In fact it has been sluggish since moving to 8.1. She also has a habit of downloading stuff onto it that she doesn't want or need.

She isn't tech savvy in any way whatsoever and I was thinking about a dual boot setup with a Linux distro to see how she fares. There isn't anything I can think of that she needs to run that she can't get a suitable equivalent on Linux.

I was thinking about Elementary OS - any thoughts? I am better of with something like Mint, if so Cinnamon or Mate?

I did run a live distro of Ubuntu a while back for her but it did cause her laptop to overheat so ideally I want a distro with excellent out of the box hardware support.
 
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I've used both ubuntu unity (currently my favourite) and mint.

Both required pretty much zero configuration, set a username and password, enter a wifi key and that's pretty much it, even my ancient obscure wifi card which is a nightmare to find windows drivers for just worked immediately.

Elementary OS is one I'll try in future if the mood takes me, I think the main decider is preference over the gui/what you prefer the look/feeling of.. So you'll just have to try them out.

I forget if it was ubuntu or mint or both that even sorts out duel booting for you, during installation it says, hey, there's another OS here, do you want to duel boot or overwrite the existing OS.
 
I'm running unity on a an Intel core2, on board graphics and 2gb ddr2.
It runs far better than win7 ever did, but to be fair this box is my bedroom pc, a media box basically, torrents, surfing and movies. Some films if very high definition are a bit choppy, but that's down to the ancient inboard graphics chip.
 
Manjaro (Cinnamon is best imho). Its Cinnamon edition uses just 350MB of RAM at idle after boot, is slick, has access to Arch's AUR (i.e. tons of software), and it's very fast... like an order of magnitude faster than *buntu based distros, especially at installing software etc.

It has all codecs, flash etc installed out of the box, is rolling release (no need to wipe/upgrade every six months) and is very stable. Software packages are very much more up to date than Mint et al. and you get extremely good hardware and driver detection. For example with an Nvidia card it will automatically install the bumblebee and other necessary drivers when you install the distro. Everything is seamless and they include great management tools for the kernel and system drivers. I'm rocking the latest 4.x kernel atm (rather than the default 'safe' 3.18 LTS kernel), and all it took was two clicks in their kernel tool. The system then downloaded the kernel, headers, modules etc automatically and set everything up for me. Super nice.

Cinnamon looks very Windows-esque (it will be familiar to her) and is also fully featured. Easy to customise, easy to add extras to if you need them, but is ready to go out of the box if that's all you need. Try it on a live USB before you decide.
 
arfoll said:
imho whatever you're running. Easier to maintain and when the inevitable problems come you'll be able to answer. I went from Xubuntu -> Arch Linux -> Fedora on my other half's laptop. Tbh I'd probably put Xubuntu back on there, I'm really not a fedora fan (but decided to stop wasting my time configuring arch on her laptop).

On that kind of spec you'll have no issue running whatever DE you want, just let her try a few, I find people from windows seem to really like xfce.
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I'm not actually running Linux on any machine myself so that isn't a consideration. I haven't used Linux to any extent since the 90s.
 
spudbynight said:
how much of a headache will it be for me to maintain this for her?
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Debian or derivatives

Update repo list.
Code: 
sudo apt-get update

Perform the upgrade.
Code: 
sudo apt-get upgrade

Fedora

Update repo list and get update info.
Code: 
sudo dnf updateinfo

Perform the update.
Code: 
sudo dnf update

RPM based still using yum package manager

Code: 
sudo yum update

Or using the GUI software installer / updater. You really shouldn't have to drop to the terminal for anything on a modern Linux distro if you're a basic user. You might have to install proprietary drivers for the dedicated GPU, if it uses that nvidia switchable graphics thing (can't remember it's name, but the linux project to support it is called bumblebee). And codecs for decoding audio and video, but that's about it.
 
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spudbynight said:
Installed Elementary OS and it was laggy as anything I have ever used. Installed Mint and it runs like a dream. No issues.

Lets see what my wife makes of it.
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Thats odd, elementary is supposed to be good for low powered machines, so I'd expect it to be lightning fast on an i5! :confused:

I have it on my netbook which has a 1.6GHz solo core Atom and 2GB of DDR2, and it runs fine! :p
 
spudbynight said:
And for someone IT savvy but not proficient in Linux, how much of a headache will it be for me to maintain this for her? I really want something I can deploy and leave her to it.
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Pretty much zero maintenance compared to windows if it's just a facebook/video player/web browser box.
There's the odd system update but it's far less annoying than windows constantly nagging you.
You'll want to set browser preferences to not keep too much history etc if you really want, but half the beauty of linux is you can reformat the whole thing and get what you want set up in 30-40 mins and have a nice fresh or different OS.

If the missus has a habit of saving stuff locally, might be worth partitioning the drive for documents etc, or use cloud storage, gmail, facebook, photo hosts etc.
That way you can just reformat with a new linux OS pretty much whenever the mood takes you.
 
I did run a live distro of Ubuntu a while back for her but it did cause her laptop to overheat so ideally I want a distro with excellent out of the box hardware support.
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I'd have thought a recent kernel would generally support most everything? Personally I'd go with Arch Linux and a lightweight DM like XCFE on top. You could try Gnome/KDE but if Ubuntu ran slowly it could very well have been because of that.

A bit more hassle to set up Arch but it's really not too hard.
 
Managed to find out the cause of the overheating. The laptop has a Nvidia Optimus enabled GPU setup. This means it has an Intel GPU and an Nvidia GPU. On Windows it automatically switches between them. With the out of the box drivers on Linux both run at full tilt causing all the heat.

There is a driver package called Bumblebee which resolves this. All running nice and cool now.
 
spudbynight said:
Managed to find out the cause of the overheating. The laptop has a Nvidia Optimus enabled GPU setup. This means it has an Intel GPU and an Nvidia GPU. On Windows it automatically switches between them. With the out of the box drivers on Linux both run at full tilt causing all the heat.

There is a driver package called Bumblebee which resolves this. All running nice and cool now.
Click to expand...

That you running Mint now then?
 
Yes, went with Mint Cinnamon. Very happy with it so far. My wifes laptop should be perfectly able to cope with any OS thrown at it.

The reason Windows 8 was sluggish is because it was nearly constantly at about 100% load on the hard drive. I spent a year trying to figure out the cause without success.

She has Windows 8 and Mint in a dual boot setup now. She hasn't needed to boot into Windows so far. :)
 
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