I have recently acquired a laptop with less than stellar specs. It is an Asus x401u with an AMD E1-1200 APU, 4gb of RAM, and a Radeon HD 7310.

I am currently running Fedora 23 (64-bit) in the lovely Cinnamon Spin and it is currently quite snappy with only a few minor issues. Now, this is my first time back with Fedora in a very long time. I have traditionally stuck with Debian and its derivatives in the past, and I really am enjoying being back in Fedora.

My question is; are my days numbered? Given that Fedora is pretty cutting edge and they do not support their older releases I will likely have to upgrade at least once per year to stay current on even security updates. This leaves me wondering if,on this particular laptop anyway, should I be considering something with a longer support cycle like an LTS distribution. Or, am I mistaken in thinking that my laptop will not have what it takes to run the Cinnamon Spin of Fedora for very long?

Thanks in advance for your insight.

TuxSurfer

LTS? Do you mean "LFS == Linux From Scratch?"

Well, first of all: "frankly, that 'less than stellar' (as you call it ...) machine seems quite satisfactory to me." Even though the day will come when "Ol' Dobbin" finally must be abandoned, I made very satisfactory use of a machine that was originally equipped with Windows 95(!) for nearly two(!!) decades.

Obviously, "'distros" consist of: "very easily-consumable collections of packages, tied up with a pretty red bow." When a new release ("collection of packages ...") comes out, the previous ones of course are not abandoned. At least, not right away. Updates will continue to be provided for them for quite some time, but eventually the "fee-chur" updates will cease but the "security" updates will continue for quite-much longer. The odds are quite reasonable, actually, that this will be enough to cover the effective life-span of your system.

Should it not, then I would handily recommend the gentoo distribution, which is: "source-code based ('you compile it yourself ...'), but not a learning exercise."

FYI: "I have done both, and I would ... each in its own very-different way ... recommend both." If you want to really learn Linux you are an unabashed "operating-systems geek," I suggest that you should seriously spend some time ... both with Linux From Scratch and Gentoo.

"I'm very glad I did."

I only run LTS (Long Term Support) releases. I think a 9 month life cycle is just silly...

On LinuxMint 17.x I don't have to re-install until 2019.

So, if that appeals to you, I would consider an LTS release.

LM 17.x is based on Ubuntu 14.04.x LTS
And it has a Cinnamon spin.

I prefer distros that value stability over bleeding edge.

Frankly, I've never encountered something that I needed to do and could do on a bleeding edge distro that I couldn't also do on Slackware, Debian, or a *buntu LTS.

LTS (long term support) for the world!

but the longest term support (i.e. indefinitely) is a rolling release distro. which is usually not recommended for inexperienced users.

I've only been using linux for a year, if I didn't start with a rolling release distro I'd likely know about 10% of what I learned so far. There would be no reason for me ever to learn how to properly debug.

This rather assumes that the OP wants to know how to debug properly. Personally, I'd rather have something that didn't require me to! Most people want a computer to run software, not to study the innards of the operating system.

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I like to upgrade my OS when I want to, not when the developers say I have to. 6 month release cycles are just ridiculous, I don't go anywhere near those distros. I also don't go anywhere near test-bed distros whose sole purpose is to flush out bugs so they don't infect their big brother (Fedora vs RHEL).

Personally I would think the laptop ought to be fine with Fedora for a while yet. I know I used to run Debian Sid on an EEEPC with a single-core Intel Atom and 1GB of RAM up until about a year ago and it was fine. It wasn't fast, of course, nor would I expect it to be but it was fine. Mind you I use XFCE no matter which distribution I use and I wouldn't be certain that KDE would be nice to use on even the i3 laptop I'm typing this on.

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Yes you should for stability. Slackware is always LTS

Yes, I am referring to Long Term Support (LTS). I haven't used Fedora in a very long time. I have learned that they only support the OS (including patches, security, etc) one version back, so about a year. Coming from Debian that seems like an eye blink. I have another system, my primary system, that runs Debian. I acquired this laptop and a couple other pieces of kit for an old iPad I had laying around so I'm just kinda playing with it (something I can't afford to do on my main system. I guess I'm not used to the bleeding edge and a distro that updates so frequently. Not being familiar with Fedora, I was just not sure how far into the future this computer could go.

I have been considering playing with something like Gentoo, Slackware or Arch that can be custom tailored to the host computer. That's something I've never done before. I have been using Linux for a very long time as my primary system and as @DavidMcCann speculated, debugging is not something I do a lot of, my interest is in photography and especially photo editing with open source software. However, I do enjoy playing with computers and Linux as a hobby as well which has taught me most of what I know and has allowed me to keep using Linux as my primary system over the years.

This has been helpful, thank you for all of your input.

personal preference. some people like switching OS's every 6 - 12 months. For my laptop that I use alot I prefer to keep the same OS for at least 2 - 3 years. So I choose Debian stable I had wheezy for i think 2 years. Will probably keep jessie on it til there is no more security updates or get new laptop (which probably wont happen anytime soon)