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.)

  •  ono   ( @ono@lemmy.ca ) English
    0•1 year ago

    KDE in 8GB RAM won’t leave you much room for applications. If you can’t get more memory, I suggest trying a lighter desktop environment, or maybe using ZRAM or ZSWAP.

    •  Destragras   ( @Destragras@kbin.social ) 
      3•1 year ago

      8GB of RAM for KDE Plasma should be more than enough. I’d say starting at 4GB and below that you’d run into problems. I’m saying this as somebody that has Firefox with several tabs, Libreoffice, two heavy electron apps, an email client and other miscellaneous bits and bobs open while only using just under 6GB of RAM.

    •  Spiracle   ( @Spiracle@kbin.social ) 
      2•1 year ago

      I’ve used KDE (including Plasma) on 8 GB RAM for years. Never had an issue, though I did only play old/indie games. On old hardware like this, I’d probably try it and maybe switch later if I notice that RAM is the bottleneck.