I have an old laptop, an Acer Aspire 5050 64-bit with 4GB memory (the most it can take). It ran WinXP when new.

Currently it has Linux Mint Xfce 64-bit installed, but it often freezes and has to be restarted, especially when I use Firefox rather than the Falkon browser.

Is LMDE 64-bit less demanding on the hardware than LM Xfce 64-bit? Hence less likely to freeze.

I prefer the ease of use and familiarity of Mint.

Thanks.

No. The only difference between the 2 is debian testing vs ubuntu... which is based on likely the same debian testing snapshot + ubuntu's changes. in this case cinnamon is heavier than xfce so the xfce lm will be lighter.

With a machine that old you'd be better served with something having lxde / lxqt. At the end of the day no matter how light the distro the hardware can only do so much. I have a core2duo laptop with an ssd. Even with no more than a window manager it runs like crap. Just the way it is.

Thanks.

I'd be interested in any suggestions for other distributions.

What I especially like in Mint are the Software Manager, called "mintInstall", and the Update Manager "mintUpdate", which make it easy to install or uninstall programs, and maintain them. The Software Manager is very good in rating programs, offering a choice, showing user comments, and pictures.

I have not been able to find any list of Linux systems that use them, but a picture of the PeppermintOS desktop indicates that it uses mintinstall - I've just realised why it's called Pepper-MINT-OS. It used to use Lxde, but now it uses Xfce, so I am not sure if it is more suitable for old machines than Mint Xfce.

Would PeppermintOS be better for old machines than Mint Xfce?

It is mentioned somewhere online that MX Linux is similar to Peppermint.

AntiX is often recommended for old machines.

I do appreciate and give thanks for all the selfless hard work that people do in creating these OS and making them freely available.

I shall try out Peppermint, AntiX, and MX linux as live DVDs.

I shall look into Lxqt operating systems.

I have a laptop - not very new - that until recently had only 6GB RAM. I was/am also running mint cinnamon as my daily driver. And...recently tried out LMDE. IMO, the cinnamon version of mint is not much more resource hungry than any of my XFCE distros and I think it ran circles around LMDE. This coming from a person also running debian SID KDE with just a doubling up of memory - very smooth.

You hit your limit on mem and that will be your bottleneck. You could maybe dedicate some room on the disk for a swap drive and play with the swappiness. You might want to look into other browsers. FF in several of it's incarnations is a resource hog and there are tips for the googling to tune their configs for best performance.

I also tried out Peppermint and found it a little too buggy/laggy as well as no great savings in resource usage over cinnamon mint. YMMV For now, Mint cinnamon will remain number one on my internal SSD. I have not found a better distro/DE combo on my hardware.

If you want to go way low resource DE try out Watt OS. It is a new DE for you but the lightest I found in all my tryouts. The savings were not worth the loss of eye candy and conveniences for me but I keep the ISO handy.

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Nishtya,

Thanks for the mention of wattOS, which I had never heard of before.

It uses LXDE and is Debian-based.

It sounds like a useful distro for older hardware and its reviews are generally positive:
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wattos

I tried Live DVDs of PeppermintOS, antiX, WattOs, and MX Linux.

PeppermintOS - could not find the Mint Software Manager "mintinstall", so therefore of less interest to me.

antix - was too technical.

WattOS - on two different machines gave an error when I told it to shut down.

MX Linux Fluxbox - had the best graphics, seems to be a polished version of antiX.

Most of them used "Firefox ESR". At least one of them displayed the right time for the UK, I think it was MX. Another one got the the minutes wrong, not just the time zone.

If I was going to choose from these, I would choose MX Linux Fluxbox. But I think I will stick for the time being with Mint Xfce so that I can use mintinstall, even though it often freezes.


I have also now become aware of two further possibilities -

a) Installing and using the lightweight Fluxbox desktop as an alternative desktop to the default Linux Mint desktops. I did not know this was possible, but the Mint Software Manager offers Fluxbox as a download.

(Even on the computer I am using to write this, which has Mint Cinnamon installed, the software Manager tells me I also have Mate installed - perhaps because I installed Thunar.)

See https://www.howtogeek.com/193129/how...ment-on-linux/

Questions -

1) Would using Fluxbox with Mint Xfce reduce the hardware resources needed while using Fluxbox instead of Xfce?

2) Could I still use the Mint Software Manager?


b) The "Ubuntu Software Center" offered the same facilities as Mint's Software Manager. Perhaps I can find a lightweight OS that offers this or its successors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Software_Center


I wish there was a Fluxbox (etc) version of Mint.

I would think so since I am antiX full time user.

I kinda understand how say antiX is too techy and then ask about running fluxbox on Mint. But to each their own.
I guess network manager is easier for you than conman. Been a antiX guy for years. So go with comfy
I always say.

Oh. In case you did not know.
https://i.postimg.cc/KjgH4KCV/screenshot.jpg

Mint has not had fluxbox supported version since version 6 or 7 I believe. Good luck.

I had assumed that the laptop would freeze because it had overheated, but another possibility is that the Linux Mint Xfce OS sometims crashes with that particular hardware.

Debian is said to be very stable, in other words crash-proof. So I have now made a Live DVD of LMDE 64bit to try, and if that goes well to install.

Another possibility for old low spec computers might be running a 32bit OS on a 64bit machine, but I do not want to do that.

Wrong.

Debian provide a "stable" release, which means it "doesn't change. It is certainly not "crash proof".

With 4GB you have enough memory to get by, the bottleneck is the Athlon X2 1.7Ghz CPU. That laptop is likely to be one of the machines from the Windows Vista era, which were notoriously supposed to run Vista but were often downgraded to XP for performance reasons.

Your problem is likely related to the low spec, but actually very likely to be thermal/cooling problem and this will manifest when the processor is under load. A modern browser puts that system under heavy load.

Those Athlon X2 CPUs notoriously had cooling problems and ran very hot (as I recall around 60C under some load, but if they went a few degrees C above that, you were in for trouble). That's likely to be where the problem lies. You should monitor your CPU temperature to see how high it goes under load.

If you're able, remove the back cover, remove dust and clean the CPU fan out. If that alone isn't enough, you might have to look into replacing thermal compound. Personally I don't bother with any machines with a CPU older than the later Core2 CPUs, as they're pretty much incapable of doing anything useful unless you specifically want a retro system for an old OS.

Are you saying that irrespective of the OS, it is using Firefox that is the problem?

Do OS have much CPU background overhead compared with using Firefox?

Does the overhead of OSs differ much?

Have you ran

yet so you can look at this

While your gear is running? I have cleaned, re-pasted cpu with artic silver cpu paste. When the new battery comes in,
This laptop is about refurbished as I can afford to make it.