need recomendations by tuning Leap15.1 on old laptop

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Old Laptop with Core™2 CPU T7400 @ 2.16GHz and RAM=2G

Leap15.1 (xfce)
simultaneously launched: lebreWord,libreSpreadSheet, FireFox, Skype, Evolution ( i use mail O365).
What are the tips for optimizing leap15.1 for working on weak hardware and such applications?

Serg

2

Do you have problems in running that suite of programs together?

3

From time to time, the laptop stops responding to the keyboard and mouse. disk access lamp is on. Ctrl-Alt-F1 does not respond. have to turn off the power button.
especially often when I launch viber desktop. he uses ram heavily.

4

With only 2GB Ram, I assume that you will get swapping when that is exhausted. I do not think you can do much about that apart from avoiding starting to many applications (and of course using a light DE).

5

Thank you.

“light DE” == “xfce”
?

6
  1. Set up with a much swap space as possible – swapping as such isn’t really as bad as claimed – old UNIX®, «and other
    », systems used to do it all the time … 1. Single ext4 partition – system and user directories are in this single partition.
  2. Choose a “lightweight” desktop GUI – as you have already done – but, be aware that, the applications you’ve listed use GTK and will therefore, consume memory as they see fit – the system may well begin to swap …
  3. Minimize the number of packages installed.
  4. Avoid running any server processes.
  5. Reduce the amount of aggression the Kernel uses for swapping – the “swappiness” Kernel parameter:

The openSUSE default is ‘60’ – “cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness”
You can change the value “on the fly” to see if the swapping rate is an issue or not – for example: “sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10”
You can make the chosen value permanent by adding “vm.swappiness=10” (for example) to a “swappiness.conf” file (the name is an example) located in ‘/etc/sysctl.d/’

7

The Intel CPU model you describe is not old enough to have any problems at all…
So, I wouldn’t worry one bit and follow every recommendation you see for currently shipped hardware.
You should even be able to run fully featured, heavy load DE like KDE/Plasma, Gnome and Enlightenment without a problem.
I do recommend though that you upgrade your RAM to the max, minimum to 4GB but I’d guess your machine should support 16GB. It’d be the best $50 usd you can spend.
Around that time, there was perhaps only one significant thing to be aware of but is strictly hardware and not related to software in any way… Intel sold a “Core 2 Duo” family and a “2 core” family… They sound similar but are very different, the former which is what you have performed much better than the latter which was the end of an inferior architecture.

Other thing which perhaps is just background but should happen automatically is that you should keep your system updated regularly because like all Intel CPUs older than a year or so as of this writing, they are vulnerable to side-loading attacks. It’s a fundamental flaw in the CPU that can’t be fixed in any but the most recently shipping CPUs, but with every update you get from openSUSE you will get a firmware update that attempts to block all known ways of attacking the vulnerability.

Other than that…
Enjoy.
You should be able to run anything and everything with pretty good performance, even heavy loads like virtualization, transcoding, database apps, more.

TSU

8

My 2 cents:

  • >= 4 GB RAM
  • replace HDD by SSD, this will also make swapping faster.
9

Got very reasonable performance on a https://www.notebookcheck.net/Medion-Akoya-S5612.22601.0.html Replaced HDD by 840 Evo SSD and Windows 7 by Xubuntu. Optimize by closing all applications not needed for the current task. They will start really fast when needed again.