Need suggestions on Distro for slow laptop

Hi all, well I have Fedora 37 loaded on my laptop that has an i3 cpu and 8 Gigs of ram and it works pretty good, but here’s the question. I’m looking up how to switch from Gnome desktop to another one a little faster and learn to use and configure because my 2nd laptop is extremely slow. This laptop unfortunately it only has a Celeron N3060 1.6Ghz and its extremely slow. So question also is there another distro close to Fedora I can install to make it a little faster? I’ll keep playing with it, but curious.
Thank you,
Jose

There are a number of lite-weight DEs and WMs to pick from. My personal favorite would be XFCE. XFCE is the most feature rich of them in my opinion. There is also LXDE (which is what Raspberry PI OS used/uses[?])… and then things like the various tiling window managers are very lite too. Quite a few old-school users like MATE and claim it is very lite too.

Luckily, Fedora makes spins for all of those and more… but if you prefer, you can use your package manager to add one or more DEs/WMs to your system in addition to GNOME… and you can pick what you want at the login screen with the little gear icon.

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Hi Jose,

Such questions do not belong to the introductions but to
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ → feel free to open a topic there.

Generally, the desktop environment makes a huge difference when it comes
to the use of system resources. Therefore, you could consider to test a
spin of Fedora that uses a “lightweight” and low-resource-usage desktop
environment: XFCE Desktop and LXQT Desktop might be interesting for
you since both are intended explicitly for being lightweight and for low
resources usage: see https://spins.fedoraproject.org/ for more.

There are also well Wikipedia articles about both
XFCE and
LXQT that might offer some
complementary information.

Maybe that helps a bit.

Chris

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Fedora is fine. It’s the DE that is slow on your hardware.

Install XFCE on it. I think you will find an increase in responsiveness.

Mike

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If someone hasn’t already suggested it, you could try a tiling window manager like sway or i3. Had a similar situation and was able to comfortable use fedora with either one. Just takes some getting used to.

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Thanks Chris, I’ll check XFCE out and honestly I thought I was in Ask Fedora group guess I clicked on wrong tab? I have both open and switch back and forth. Actually I have 3 tabs open other is Fedora Docs… I’ll try and be more careful in the future.

Thank you,
Jose

I myself hate gnome. I started with X windows right from the very beginning, and find the modern Window managers too restrictive, without the ability to customise the event structure (adding hot keys to do things).

Window Manager: OpenBox
Panel Bar: FCE Panel
Terminal: Xterm (with sixel graphics enabled)

Anthony

You can switch to a lighter desktop environment like Xfce or LXDE in Fedora to speed up your Celeron N3060 laptop. You can install either Xfce or LXDE by running the following command in the terminal:

For Xfce:

sudo dnf install @xfce-desktop-environment

For LXDE

sudo dnf install lxde-desktop-environment

If you’re still unsatisfied with the performance, you can try other lightweight Linux distributions such as LXLE, Peppermint, or Xubuntu. These distros are designed to be fast and efficient on older hardware.

I am a little new and learning about Linux, but to add to the previous commentators, you definitely want to try a light weight desktop environment like XFCE. Being newer to Linux, I had to learn that it generally doesn’t matter what “distro” you’re using, as the Linux operating system as a whole is a combination of “layers” (kernel, drivers, desktop environment, etc) that make up the complete experience and that you can choose what components you want. GNOME for instance will generally be GNOME on all other distros with maybe a few custom aesthetic features respectively. Each distro can have it’s own spin on the end user experience. Of course, a graphically pleasing desktop environment like GNOME will be more resource intensive and the addition of animation extensions will add to the demand on resources. Best thing is to (like others have stated) keep it basic to a DE (desktop environment) like XFCE which isn’t quite as polished as GNOME but will provide a similar end user experience. Good luck friend.

Hi Jose,

I would recommend trying KDE o XFCE on your Celeron. That should run very nice.

Regards
Joachim

            Fedora will work ok.  You may wish to have as much RAM

as it can support (8Gb), avoid Electron apps, and possibly use a
lightweight desktop such as LXQT or LXDE (
https://spins.fedoraproject.org/ ) though Gnome/KDE should be ok if not
running too many applications concurrently. May also want to configure
SWAP space. A few packages in Fedora may use AVX2 instructions, which
may not work on N3060. Battery life should be good on such a laptop. It
should work for internet, email, document processing etc. but processor
heavy tasks such as video processing will be slow.

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I may suggest you for an old and slow laptop, try Rasberry Pi OS for PC. It is a customized Debian distribution for x86 hardware with same tweaks and configuration they did for the arm board.

Alternative, try most recent Fedora with LMDE or tweak Gnome as at current state, uses low amount of ram and animations can be turned off.

If the laptop could support and you don’t have yet, replace the HDD with an SDD, as that is the snail in any pc. Today there are even SD cards that can do 1500IOPS with 30-60mb transfers, as an old HDD does only 60-120IOPS. High IOPS is what you want for a snappy desktop experience.

It’s a Chromebook (in spirit if not in name) with a pokey Celeron CPU, I don’t think I’d be looking to squeeze 1.5KIOPS out of whatever storage interface it supports. That CPU maxes out at four PCIe 2.0 lanes, and if nothing else, a NIC has to be connected to it somehow and eating up at least one of them…

Hi Jose,

No worries. The confusion around ask.fp and discusison.fp is nothing
new, that happens regularly if people are new to our structures. This is
one of the reasons why we will merge both pages. So all good :wink:

Good luck with XFCE! Feel free to also try the other Spins to check out
which fits your needs best. You have already a lot of suggestions here
:slight_smile: I guess you know that the live images (so, what you get when
downloading any of the Spins images) can be used and tested without
“touching” your storage.

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That is a powerfull beast to do backend development using vim.

Hola Jose!

As others have said, anything else appart from Gnome will work fantastic (what makes your laptop slow is not Gnome per se, but its animations, which you can disable in the Accesibilities menu (see the pic. attached).

You may install KDE, XFCE, Mate or LxQt (I suggest to try them in this order, and use the one that performs ok according to your needs, probably KDE will work fantastically).

I suggest you to directly install one of the spins with those DEs preinstalled already with their apps.

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Well, speed is a not just related to your desktop environment. Here are some options if you want to stay with Fedora:

  1. Add an ssd to the system if it doesnt have one, they are relatively cheap these days

  2. Move to a lightweight desktop, like xfce or LXDE. I here plasma 5 (KDE) is pretty speedy now too.

  3. Move to a tiling window manager like i3

Outside of Fedora, you could also look for a lightweight distro, like Tiny Core OS.

Gary

Try XFCE desktop manager, its all I use.
We use Fedora and Debian distro’s for most things
So if you need security use Fedora and XFCE.
If you need speed use Debian and XFCE.

Go to “/etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc” and disable stuff.
Make sure you make a backup copy of “tumbler.rc” before you modify it.
You will have to be root to modify it.

Fedora is hit slower than Debian. IDK about security, though, as I don’t know if Debian comes with any kind of MAC protection.

I agree, though, that Xfce will run well on your computer.

EDIT: Fedora is not slower than Debian

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I assume “hit” is meant to be “a bit”? Or did you mean something else?

I don’t think it is actually generally true. But it will depend on what you are doing and how you’ve tuned the system.

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