Recommended Fedora Spin For Older Desktop

Ask Fedora
1

Hi,

I’m finally getting around to wiping Windows 10 off a few older Dell Optiplex’s desktops I have laying around. I just want to get a few recommendations on maybe what DE to use and whether some of the Fedora spins will run at all?

I normally use KDE on most of my laptops, so ideally maybe stay with that. But not too sure how well it’s going to run considering these are 15yrs old. Windows 10 still runs, but it’s a bit laggy sometimes.

The first machine is an Optiplex-990 SFF. It’s got

  • i7 2600
  • upgraded to a 128GB SATA SSD
  • 350GB HDD
  • 8GB RAM
  • No wifi, just a 1GB LAN
  • Added USB3 board
  • Has a lower Radeon GPU in it (R5 430 OUGA13)

The second is a USFF Optiplex-790. It’s got

  • i7-2600S
  • 16GB RAM
  • Upgraded to a 120GB SATA SSD
  • No wifi again, just a 1GB LAN
  • Integrated intel graphics

They’ll probably end up being arcade emulators - MAME machine, Atari etc. But for the time being, probably just ripping DVDs. Nothing too strenuous. Maybe run some VMs on the 990. The smaller one might end up a guitar effects unit - so I was thinking of putting Jam labs on it.

A couple of other questions:

  • I gather XFCE and LXQT spins update just as regularly as the KDE version?
  • Does Fedora do an LTS version like Ubuntu? For these particular ones, I probably want something that only wants security patches.
  • Or considering they’ll end up MAME machine, Bazzite? Or doesn’t really matter what I use?
  • Is Games Lab a better option?

Cheers

2

I think you will like LXQt more than XFCE, and its also lighter.

No. KDE is tries to bring latest features while XFCE and LXQt are not focused on that.

No. You can look into Fedora/RHEL based distributions that focuses on LTS.

3

KDE Plasma should run on that machine just fine. The HDD might be a bottleneck but try the Live ISO and use it for a bit without installing to get an idea.

4

Cheers. I’ll try LXQT on them as well when I get a chance. I downloaded it the other day for an old laptop to try on, but LXQT didn’t want to work on it for some reason (just gave a torn screen from the live USB).

If LXQT and XFCE don’t update as much as KDE, that should be fine and what I’m after.

BTW Is Cinnamon’s update frequency similar to XFCE/LXQT as well?

Thanks. I tried KDE 44 on both yesterday and yeah, no issues. I was expecting it to be a bit laggy like Win10 was. But it felt just like using KDE on my newer machines (and that was running it through the USB2.0 ports). It’s just the regular 5GB updates every week I don’t want to worry about on these LOL.

And they both have SATA SSDs to run the OS from. I just left the original HDD in one for extra storage.

5

This doesn’t really make a lot of difference as you get the same frequent kernel updates, and a lot of the core packages are shared between the editions and spins, and they also get regular updated.

So it is mostly op to personal preference.

6

It looks like updates are being released very frequently.

7

Thanks for the reply. As much as I want to keep everything Fedora based amongst the herd, I might have to look into distro’s that have LTS kernels instead for these couple in that case. Probably MX -Linux

8

If you want something LTS, you should try out Rocky Linux.

9

I will. The thought never crossed my mind to check out Rocky Linux - I thought it was predominantly for servers. And I see they do a KDE desktop version too. This might hit the spot.