I want to revive an old Lenovo laptop with an AMD A6 2.6GHz and 4GB ram, what would be the best option for a DE?
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PSA no matter how light your distro, any modern app or webpage will use all that power
I usually go with Xfce.
That’s fast enough to run the latest Linux Mint with Cinnamon. I have two laptops with the exact same cpu speed (passmark score) and 4 GB of ram. With 2 GB swap file you will be in business.
Oh, that’s pretty neat info. I’m more of an Arch user but I might give Linux mint a try now that I know that. Thanks
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cinnamon Cinnamon is available for Arch, would be the same or better
Arch + Cinnamon is neato!
LXQt, XFCE Or a window manager, they’re all lightweight.
Its fairly difficult to find “up-to-date” performance / RAM comparisons of Linux Desktop environments, but here’s a decent one from 2019 comparing memory usage of different Ubuntu flavors.
The most surprising thing is that despite KDE Plasma’s reputation as being more ram-hungry, it actually used less ram than XFCE, meaning its developers have been making performance a focus.
Technically not a DE, but I like plain openbox.
A window manager like i3 or Openbox. If you are curious what that’s like, then try out Bunsenlab Linux. (XFWM4 is also a great choice, but it requires some know how to properly rip out the rest of Xfce, like the relatively heavy desktop and the panel)
I would go mx linux fluxbox
KDE plasma. From my experience it uses less resources than lxqt and xfce and works out of the box while lxqt and xfce required extra work to get wifi, screen brightness controls and audio working. I can have 10+ tabs in a chromium based browser open without lag on an old laptop with 2GB ram and 1.33 - 1.83GHz 4 core intel atom from 10 years ago.
s/chromium/Firefox/g
Xfce, LXQt or just install JWM and enjoy the 30 Mb idle RAM usage
LXQt, XFCE, Maté, TDE. Any of them will do. Which you choose depends on personal preference and how large an ecosystem you want—LXQt has only a few basic applications, TDE has pretty much everything that was in KDE3, the others are somewhere in between.
If you don’t need a full desktop environment, check-out IceWM.
I recently checked-out Trinity ( essentially KDE 3 modernized ) and was surprised how decent it was. I used it in Q4OS but it may be available in your distro.
I use IceWM on antiX. Seems to be a good mix of low resource usage and aesthetics.
Your biggest problem is going to be the 4 GB of RAM. Saving a few hundred megs on the DE will help but not much. If you run a web browser ( and I cannot imagine using a computer without one ) that RAM is going to fill up fast.
Honestly, I would use a 32 bit distro on that hardware.
Q4OS with Trinity, Antix, Adelie, and DSL are all pretty decent options.
You could try Niri. I have tested it with a ~10 year old notebook with a 1st gen Core i5 cpu.
But, even newest Gnome runs smooth on this machine.
Xfce
