Dug my old laptop out (HP G60, Turion X2 64) - and installed Mint XFCE on it - so far it’s useable, but of course still slow. I’m amazed it works as well as it does (3 GB ram and an SSD). The CPU usage is at 100% a lot of the time.
My question is, what distros do you guys like for this age of laptop? This is a spare so more for messing around. I was thinking of trying Arch as I’ve hard it’s somewhat lightweight but not sure. I’ve really only used Debian since I’ve been on linux.
Please open process monitor GUI or htop and filter what using CPU all time on 100%
I tried XFCE for some older hardware and had the same experience.
I poked around at stuff like fluxbox and found it too minimal. So I ended up using LXDE instead and got better results, but that was before it transitioned to LXQt. I have no idea if it’s still as lightweight as it used to be. Someone else might have to chime in.
I have been using alpine on a Chromebook. Its similar to Debian, but is very small. I use sway on Wayland, its not hard to learn, but most desktops are available. If your just playingwithe the laptop, try it out. Following the instructions is not as hard as it seems. https://alpinelinux.org/
I tried it out and it may be a little advanced for me. I didn’t realize all the commands are different from regular debian. I have enough trouble remembering commands from 1 distro ha!I did get it installed but from there kind of stuck
Hey you tried it. That’s an achievement. Good job. Sorry it didn’t work out.
Its definitely for the more advanced users !
Maybe. The documentation is a bit unclear in areas. If you get through the setup script and have the system installed. Its just using the scripts to set up a desktop. Then it really behaves like any other distro.
This looks fun! Yeah id like to try something different anywah
First-gen Turion processors don’t have any kind of acceleration for most of the vp9 and av1 compression used for video in http applications like yt, so even if you find it’s another process pinning the cpu, you won’t have a good time on this as a desktop.
Yt seems to play fine actually just a bit slow
Check CPU usage during playback, it won’t be pretty
100% CPU use doesnt make sense. RAM would be the main constraint not the CPU. Worth looking into - maybe a bug or broken piece of software.
Also the DE may he more the issue than the distro itself. You could install an even more lightweight desktop environment like Open box. Also worth checking whether youre using x11 or Wayland. Its easy to imagine Wayland has not been optimised or extensively tested on something like your device, and could. Easily be a random bug if the DE is pushing your CPU to 100%
There are super lightweight distros like Puppy linux.
Like some of the other comments, if you really need a DE then maybe give XFCE or LXQt a try. The distro itself won’t matter too much in your scenario.
I do have an old laptop that has run Debian/Ubuntu + Gnome fine, not at all fast but usable for my needs. Mines has 4 GB RAM, get the feeling that going under 4 GB may be a bit much.
Otherwise Linux is perfectly usable without a DE if you’re willing to stick to the terminal for all your usage.
