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I'm running debian on a >10 years old 2,4 GHz, 2GB Ram computer. Bought another 2 GB serveral years ago because i wanted HW-Virtualization, and switched from KDE to Mate somewhen inbetween. But the first time i really thought about getting a new pc was when the recent changes on facebook became obligate. Otherwise i wouldn't wonder if this setup ran for another 10 years.
I ponder switching to another distribution. I'd like to get into rhel or FreeBSD but i'm not content on how the performance on this setup would be then.
Gnome is not exactly light-weight. Try a lighter desktop like Xfce4 (I don't know if Pop OS allows you to choose the desktop environment).
To learn programming, I doubt you need Pop OS with its focus on media production, deep learning, engineering etc. As an example, Blender, one of the tools bundled in Pop OS, certainly needs a snappier PC than yours.
A normal distro without any particular focus, but tuned to older or low-end PCs, should be fine. Whatever programming tools are not included in the default installation can probably be downloaded easily.
On the other hand, if you are happy with Pop OS, why change?
By the way I wonder what you mean by "Memory: 2514MiB / 3861MiB". Is it 2514, or 3861?
Thx for your advice and btw that line was accidently added by me cuz i just copied the neofetch output.(pls dont judge me on that)
Sometimes my distro choice is a matter of the age of the device. For new laptops and other devices I tend to arch for the first six-ish months until debian stable is good enough. Networking drivers, GPU drivers, and such. In the case of my pinebook pro, I'm using Manjaro Sway. Since the GPU support for arm's Mali GPUs is better in wayland than Xorg. Still quite usable in debian stable on Xorg, except for the notice-able frame drops doing youtube fullscreen. Depends on your use case though. Kind of need Xorg for using Xdmx to string a few Xephyr windows together for a lot of $LINES in a terminal. Kind of need Wayland for responsive media consumption.
In the case of my pinebook pro, I'm using Manjaro Sway. Since the GPU support for arm's Mali GPUs is better in wayland than Xorg. Still quite usable in debian stable on Xorg, except for the notice-able frame drops doing youtube fullscreen.
Good to know!
Does that mean that video playback is generally good under wayland?
The GPU support was unbearable for video playback on my pinebook (not pro) (which I don't own anymore).
I have run Ubuntu Mint on a similarly powered setup for a number of years and it works well. You also get the advantage of it being one of the the official "flavours" of Ubuntu, which means it is well supported and follows the same release cadence of the standard Ubuntu OS. I can also recommend it from the aspect of it having a great community as well.
I'd suggest trying out the Fedora LXDE or LXQt Spins. I have both desktops on a 11-year old 64-bit desktop with 3Gb of RAM and both desktops run fine. All the other desktops I've tried, cause video corruption and/or crash. The motherboard allocates 128Mb of the RAM for the on-board video.
Good to know!
Does that mean that video playback is generally good under wayland?
The GPU support was unbearable for video playback on my pinebook (not pro) (which I don't own anymore).
Video playback is way better under wayland. I've had my pinebook playing my webcam (pointed out window) for more than a day at 1080p30. Although the power draw of that seemed to have drained the battery to 0%. Mostly I use the pinebook to watch youtube videos. Fullscreen in Manjaro Sway and it's pretty good. Works on the default debian that it shipped with too, but obvious frame drops and sluggish transitions to fullscreen and such. I have the OG pinebok too, and it really doesn't do much beyond 240p windowed. But the battery life is amazing.
Video playback is way better under wayland. I've had my pinebook playing my webcam (pointed out window) for more than a day at 1080p30. Although the power draw of that seemed to have drained the battery to 0%. Mostly I use the pinebook to watch youtube videos. Fullscreen in Manjaro Sway and it's pretty good. Works on the default debian that it shipped with too, but obvious frame drops and sluggish transitions to fullscreen and such. I have the OG pinebok too, and it really doesn't do much beyond 240p windowed. But the battery life is amazing.
Thanks.
This is good to hear, low energy consumption.
But I should've clarified: I meant driver development.
On the pinebook, at that time (2017) it was a choice between extremely sluggish software decoding under X, and a highly experimental driver for the Mali chip - the latter meant hardware-accelarated video decoding & playback plastered over the screen, over all tty's (totally ignoring X, or e.g. VLC's context menus) that would often crash, requiring a hard reboot.
So how is this almost 3 years later on the pro?
https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/o...c/xfce-vs-kde/ compares XFCE and KDE and shows the demands of both desktops are actually rather similar. There's also a youtube that shows KDE is actually more efficient in most regards, and overall. The little I use my laptop (with hardware rather similar to OP's), KDE seems a very respectable performer, though with half the RAM and slower CPU clock:
Thanks.
This is good to hear, low energy consumption.
But I should've clarified: I meant driver development.
On the pinebook, at that time (2017) it was a choice between extremely sluggish software decoding under X, and a highly experimental driver for the Mali chip - the latter meant hardware-accelarated video decoding & playback plastered over the screen, over all tty's (totally ignoring X, or e.g. VLC's context menus) that would often crash, requiring a hard reboot.
So how is this almost 3 years later on the pro?
The pinebook pro has only been out about a year. With the ANSI version first reaching my hand in January this year (ordered in November last year). The support is pretty good. That being said it's no amd or nvidia GPU on x86. But full screen stuff works well. And a dumb terminal / VNC usage, it's good enough. I've actually adjusted my manjaro sway to be running Xorg and cwm. And it can boot fairly quickly once you tame your systemd .services to only launch what one actually uses. I'm not a big bluetooth, samba, cups, and other user. Just get me up and running with networking and I'm good. Takes about 10-20 seconds to be in userland from a cold boot in my case. 3 seconds of which is holding the power button down until boot initiates.
As far as crashes, not really had any of that. Aside from powering a webcam onscreen and fullscreen for a day plus before the battery drained, while plugged in. Playing youtube fullscreen on battery only lasts about 5 hours. Panfrost (pbp) is coming along. With Lima (og pb) being out there a while now. Although the OG pinebook isn't much for horse power even with GPU support. Nice to have to configure routers so I can leave all my other things where they're configured and ON. The GPU driver is still a work in progress, chromium after a recent update gets funky, but if you open other things and don't fullscreen it, it's legible. No such issue using firefox though.
Nearly 14 GB zip file? That's crazy. And on a personal taste note, it looks cartoonish.
Their marketing strategy is a turn off also. Anything that starts with the lowercase 'i' - iLinux.
Another vote for MX Linux and a very helpful forum for new to Linux users.
8bit
Last edited by eight.bit.al; 10-07-2020 at 09:11 AM.
Until you need to download that over dialup. Takes about a month if connected 24/7 for a month. More like 5-ish / plus weeks.
Most of my "installed" distros exist in 6GB or less. Recalling earlier days that drove me towards debian. 10MB binary .deb, or 30MB sources for a web browser. AKA 1 hour versus 3. Those stats being much much worse for "current" trends, if most of us were "still" on dial-up. Yeah, the storage is cheap, but the network demand, for us normies is not to be dismissed. Most package managers don't afford me the option only use 1/3rd of my bandwidth for the next 3 days while I "update". Or 1/30th if I have 10 machines to update. Curse of the RPi
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