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Buzzz

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Hello everyone. I am a newbie to Linux after being aggravated with the latest offerings of Windows. I'm running LXLE on an older Dell Inspiron laptop (no need throwing away good equipment when you can find an operating system that works with it). I'm planning on trying some other distros. I'm hoping to learn more about Linux from all of you. Thanks for reading.

Rob
 


G'day Buzzz, and Welcome to linux.org

You are already up and running...well done !.... we may end up learning a bit from you !

Join in wherever you like...Welcome !
 
Hello everyone. I am a newbie to Linux after being aggravated with the latest offerings of Windows. I'm running LXLE on an older Dell Inspiron laptop (no need throwing away good equipment when you can find an operating system that works with it). I'm planning on trying some other distros. I'm hoping to learn more about Linux from all of you. Thanks for reading.

Rob
Welcome!
Everyone is a Linux newbie at one time or another :)
I found using my computers so much more fun when I started running Linux.
It was especially gratifying once I came to fully appreciate what the "free" in "free software" truly means.
 
I'm running LXLE on an older Dell Inspiron laptop (no need throwing away good equipment when you can find an operating system that works with it).

Rob

Hello Buzzx,

Welcome to Linux.org.

LXLE is great light weight small foot print distro that is easy on system resources and will do what the big mainstream flagships do.

I use it on several of my curb finds which are old Windows XP desktops which I've upgraded with spare parts.

Exactly.
"(no need throwing away good equipment when you can find an operating system that works with it)."

Plenty of very capable older computers that work well with Linux as it's just a matter of choosing the right Linux distro for the computer and the hardware it has.

Have fun and enjoy you're Linux adventure. :)


If memory is 4.0 GB or less than this may be useful.

This applies to most Ubuntu based Distros.

Swappiness

The swappiness setting determines when a system begins swapping data to the hard disk. A low value makes more use of memory and less use of the swap partition.

As memory storage is many times faster than hard disk storage this is what we want.

The default setting is 60, which makes swapping begin early. Lowering to, say 10 sometimes makes a significant improvement in speed, dependent on the hard disk type and workload.

To test it (for the present session only, permanent settings are unchanged) one simply does the following:



  1. Copy the command

    Code:
    cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
    to the terminal and press Enter. You will now see the present value of swappiness.
  2. Spend some minutes browsing. Notice the speed (or lack thereof).
  3. After that run the command

    Code:
    sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10
  4. Continue browsing. Do you now have a faster system with less hard disk activity?


If one wants to make the setting permanent the line vm.swappiness = 10 has to be added to /etc/sysctl.conf. It's done with the command

Code:
sudo sed -i '$ a\vm.swappiness = 10' /etc/sysctl.conf
The new setting is activated in next boot. In effect it moves workload from a slow, rotating hard drive to the memory modules, which are faster than a solid state drive, and it could be referred to as the poor man's SSD.
 
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if i could type more, i would say what poorguy said :)

i like lxle's wallpapers, too

welcome buzz

chris turner
wizardfromoz
 
Many thanks to all of you for the warm welcome, and a high-five to jglen490 for helping me to solve a problem. Hopefully, I will learn more about Linux from this forum. I'm running Windows 10 on another computer but was not really happy with it because of the "spying" that it does, so I blew the dust off this old dell laptop and wiped the hard drive, and reinstalled Vista and installed LXLE alongside it. I'm really liking LXLE and may try some other distros. The only reason I reinstalled Vista is for the things that are not compatible with Linux. The old Dell actually runs better on Linux that it does on the newly installed Vista and also runs better than my Windows 10 computer. Enough of my rambling...thanks again to you all.

Rob
 
G'day Buzzz and welcome.
 
@Buzzz
I'm a doin' fine and how you going yourself?
 
I new here to rob, I played with a few of them . If you plan to on move check ubuntu with xfce desktop, ubuntu has a minimal install option, also try Mint Linux. Ubuntu is based on Debian and Mint is based Ubuntu but lately Mint has be baseing their os on Debian, Both Ubuntu and Mint are easy for newcomers. Debian is not as friendly . On Debian i had sound problems and i running 2 year old hard wear. I currently on Ubuntu 18.04Lts and everything is working fine.
 
Yes, from what I have read here and on other sites, I am planning to try Ubuntu and Mint. I don't know when I will get around to it, but maybe it won't be too long in the near future. Thanks Leonardo for the suggestions!
 
FWIW.

LMDE 4 Debbie is based on Debian and it does use Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop which is Gnome 3 base and requires a lot of system hardware resources.

That being the case if your computers hardware / graphics hardware isn't powerful enough your LMDE 4 Debbie isn't going to be a good experience.

Older computers with weaker hardware / graphics hardware will be better off with using Linux Mint 19.3 Xfce and is Debian / Ubuntu base and uses the Xfce desktop which requires less system resources.

Same with Ubuntu 18.04 which is also Gnome 3 and requires a lot of system resources.
A better choice would be Xubuntu (Xfce desktop) or Lubuntu (Lxqt desktop) and both of these are a lightweight desktop and therefore doesn't require a lot of system resources.

I run old computers from 2006 / 2010 and base this from my own personal experience although learning by doing is a sure fire way to find out with the computers you are using.

Just my 2 cent worth.
 
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