I’m about to install OpenSuse on my mum’s old laptop and I’m not sure about what environment to choose. The laptop is currently running openSuse 11.3 with Gnome 2 and that’s what my mum’s used to. As far as I know, Gnome 2 is no longer available, so I’m looking for something that’s as similar to Gnome 2 as possible and also as lightweight as possible since the laptop is quite old.
I came across LXDE, XFCE and Mate. LXDE should be the most lighweight whereas Mate should be the closest to Gnome 2. But I haven’t really used any of them (I’m a KDE user). So what would you recommend?
On 2014-07-21 09:16, tobice wrote:
>
> I’m about to install OpenSuse on my mum’s old laptop and I’m not sure
> about what environment to choose. The laptop is currently running
> openSuse 11.3 with Gnome 2 and that’s what my mum’s used to. As far as I
> know, Gnome 2 is no longer available, so I’m looking for something
> that’s as similar to Gnome 2 as possible and also as lightweight as
> possible since the laptop is quite old.
Try XFCE.
It uses the same libraries and some tools as gnome 3, but the look and
feeling is similar to Gnome 2. It is what I use.
Mate I have not tried, I don’t remember if it is available out of the
box on openSUSE.
LXDE is very lightweight, but I don’t like it much: it does not remember
the session on logout for the next session, and that for me is
important. I use it on another laptop, very old, that I use as small
server (it has no battery).
On 2014-07-22 07:56, tobice wrote:
>
> Thank you. i’ve installed XFCE and so far it seems ok. It’s slow but the
> laptop is really old
Typically memory is more of a hurdle in Linux than the CPU.
So the first idea would be to try increase RAM, if possible and
economical - some old RAM modules are now more expensive than they were
originally, because those chips are scarce (they became obsolete).
Lacking that possibility, the other one is to improve swap. If the
machine can have two or more hard disks, then distributing swap with the
same priority over them spreads the load.
Also, with more than one hard disk, files can be distributed. For
instance, root in one disk, usr in another, home in another. But only
some high end laptops can do that.
If using several hard disks is not possible, replacing the rotating,
magnetic media hard disk with an SSD, one that has reasonable fast
sustained write speed (there is variance here, and flash media tend to
be slow in this respect). These things are relatively expensive, but
results are often spectacular.
However, if the machine is too old, maybe it does not have a modern
style SATA port, and you will not be able to replace the HD at all.
Oh thanks for the tips. The thing is that my mum isn’t really demanding when it comes to performance. As long as it works, somehow, it doesn’t matter. I also believe that any investment in such an old laptop (at least 7-8 years) would be waste of money.
On 2014-07-22 09:26, tobice wrote:
>
> Oh thanks for the tips. The thing is that my mum isn’t really demanding
> when it comes to performance. As long as it works, somehow, it doesn’t
> matter. I also believe that any investment in such an old laptop (at
> least 7-8 years) would be waste of money.
It is a risky investment, if it breaks down for some other reason.
I second Cinnamon as a recommendation for DE (I prefer it over KDE or GNOME3 actually) but it may not be fast enough for an old laptop if it struggles with XFCE. Also with the latest 2.3.0 there seem to be some configuration applets missing (at least for me) for Bluetooth, display and power management (I opened a thread here and filed a bug on BugZilla (bug 888137). The bugzilla is likely not properly assigned though. I can sort of work around this by setting everything in GNOME3, then using
cinnamonh --replace
to launch Cinnamon with whatever display, power and network settings GNOME was using but it’s not perfect. But it’s such a pleasure to use Cinnamon that I bear with it for now.
