Hello there. I’m a beginner so keep that in mind. I have an old laptop (something like 10 yo). It has an HDD, 4 gigs of DDR3, an i3 4th gen 1.7 GHz and an NVidia Geforce 710M (Windows Game Ready Driver 391.35 WHQL which I think doesn’t support Wayland). It also has CSM BIOS so yeah. It has the option of UEFI but the GeForce (I think) doesn’t support it.

Currently, it has Windows 10 on it, but it has been veeeeery sluggish. I’m planning to upgrade the RAM to 8 gigs and upgrade to an SSD, but (even if I upgrade those parts) I don’t want to use Windows anymore, at all.

So, I have a few options. (kinda in order)

  1. Linux Mint
  2. Fedora, though idk if the 2 GHz requirement is a big problem
  3. Pop!_OS
  4. MX Linux
  5. Debian
  6. Ubuntu and its flavors
  7. Zorin OS

and maybe Solus? though the same problem with fedora.

Yeah yeah ik, all of these except Fedora and Solus are Debian/Ubuntu based.

DE options: (again, also kinda in order)

  1. KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)
  2. Cinnamon
  3. XFCE - LXDE - LXQT (because of “lightweightness” :D)
  4. Budgie
    5. GNOME too heavy

These are some options for me. If you have any more suggestions, let me know. Also, are there any compatibility issues with my system for the distros/DEs?

Thanks for the replies in advance.

(Note: this was also posted in the c/linux@lemmy.ml and the r/linux4noobs subreddit. don’t ask why im still on reddit, it’s because of Infinity for reddit.)

  •  Atemu   ( @Atemu@lemmy.ml ) English
    5•1 year ago

    The 710M will give you trouble. Like, pain in the ass. See if you can disable it in BIOS; you won’t be using it for “serious” gaming anyways.

    Distro doesn’t much matter. It’s fully up to personal preferences. Try them all (using Ventoy like @b9chomps@beehaw.org recommended. Some distros make the installation and management of the Nvidia driver easier than others but you should ideally be disabling that GPU entirely.
    I personally recommend Fedora to newcomers but as I said, that’s personal preference.

    Note that if some piece of hardware (i.e. wifi) doesn’t work in one of them, it most likely won’t work in any distro.

    It has the option of UEFI but the GeForce (I think) doesn’t support it.

    This doesn’t make much sense to me. The GPU plays no role in that part of the boot process.

    I’m planning to upgrade the RAM to 8 gigs and upgrade to an SSD

    Get an SSD now. Even a dirt cheap one. 4GB is tenable with careful management but a hard drive will make everything excruciatingly slow, even on Linux.