Spec me a Linux Distro for my wife's laptop

Rainmaker · 6 Jul 2015 at 04:14

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.

If you'd tried Manjaro as I suggested earlier, you'd still have the same (but more up to date) Cinnamon DE and it would have auto installed bumblebee for you (as I also mentioned).

Glad you got it sorted mate.

BTW, OhEsEcks I know it was an oversight but on Debian/*buntu distros the command you listed (sudo apt-get update) would only refresh the index. You'd need sudo apt-get upgrade to actually perform the updates. Or, to make it simpler, sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. Just in case anyone followed it and was left scratching their heads.

OP, don't do this on Mint though. Using apt-get upgrade leads to borkage on Mint systems. Another reason I prefer to avoid it.

bledd · 6 Jul 2015 at 05:49

Clean up the install and set her user as a non admin. No way will an i5 be sluggish.

8.1 is faster than 7.

spudbynight · 6 Jul 2015 at 08:54

I did a fresh Windows 8.1 install. It was still sluggish. Believe me I've spent 12 months trying to figure out the problem without success.

stopper · 6 Jul 2015 at 10:40

spudbynight said:
I did a fresh Windows 8.1 install. It was still sluggish.

I reverted back to Win7 because Win8 was sluggish on my laptop (which now has SteamOS).
Win8 is terribly slow, not many people realize that because it came about at roughly the same time as SSD's.

Napaim · 6 Jul 2015 at 12:54

The reason Windows 8 was sluggish is because it was nearly constantly at about 100% load on the hard drive.

Have you tuned anything with hdparm on Linux? I had it on my laptop and had to modify how often it would spin up the HDD since it was always running (on a base Arch install).

OhEsEcks · 7 Jul 2015 at 20:00

Rainmaker said:
BTW, OhEsEcks I know it was an oversight but on Debian/*buntu distros the command you listed (sudo apt-get update) would only refresh the index. You'd need sudo apt-get upgrade to actually perform the updates. Or, to make it simpler, sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. Just in case anyone followed it and was left scratching their heads.

Good catch. I haven't used an apt based system since the start of the year, so I'm rusty. I'm used to updateinfo and update on Fedora now. Edited to reflect fix.