Suggest Me A Lightweight Distro, Please

[brone]

My Hardware :
CPU { Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Address sizes: 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 2
On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
Model name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G620 @ 2.60GHz
CPU family: 6
Model: 42
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 2
Socket(s): 1
Stepping: 7
CPU max MHz: 2600.0000
CPU min MHz: 1600.0000
BogoMIPS: 5200.21}

Memory : 4 gigabytes
Storage : 1 terabyte (hard-disk)

I've been using Linux for almost a year now, but still a noob, and at last I've settled on Linux mint xfce, I customised it, changed things to suite me, but i still slow (not entirely) and freezes or hangs if i open 4 or applications at the same time, but some times, it hangs with two apps opened, like two or three tabs on Firefox (no such as heavy sites) and Telegram, so I've been thinking to change to a distro which takes less resources and I don't need much customisation, I just use Firefox and telegram and watch movies through a media player, please share your opinion and suggestions on this, I need some prospective maybe, and if you suggest any distro, if it uses Apt from the start it'll be really helpful as I have to install a third party USB WiFi driver through it, At last I know that this machine isn't gonna do much with that specifications but still any help or suggestion will be really helpful

 

[Condobloke]

G'day brone, Welcome to Linux.org

That system should not be hanging or freezing. it has sufficient grunt to run xfce easily.

It will not be super fast, but it should not freeze.

Is this a Laptop or a Desktop?

Have you tried another browser other than Firefox?

 

[Condobloke]

And......which version of Linux Mint xfce are you running?

19 ?.....20, 21 etc ??

If you are unsure or cant remember, type welcome in to the search in menu and it should tell you there

 

[z7vl7abxc]

in case it might be an option, i installed mint xfce on a similar system and switched out the hdd for an ssd. the hdd never did freeze, but would take some time to access data. the ssd performance is much smoother.

 

[wizardfromoz]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-weight_Linux_distribution

Welcome to linux.org

Wizard

 

[Brickwizard]

Welcome to the forums

I have a Dell laptop i use, it has an older slower CPU than yours, it quite happily runs Mint LMDE -cinnamon, Parrot home, and several other full-blown test distributions] yes it is a little slow when booting from the old disc spinner hard-drive, [which I use for testing] but has a more acceptable boot time on the SSD [which has the Mint LMDE on]
swapping to a lighter distribution may make minimal difference to the boot time of the old Hard-drive using the SSD is noticeably quicker [although you wont' get full speed from it as they are designed for SATA 3 and your laptop is probably SATA2 like mine]

 

[vs2-free-users]

Hi,

i suggest the small brother of mx-linux
antix

.
This distro is optimised for small hardware.

 

[darry1966]

Trying this one.... https://minios.dev/en/#downloads

 

[guiverc]

I'll add this, though it may not help much.

I don't think the distribution matters much when it comes to low resource hardware, as to me they're much the same, with the largest difference being what is installed & running at default (which is easily changed).

I still use devices from 2005 somewhat often (in QA testing), and am using a 2008 dell currently (core2quad) running Debian trixie. When I login I consider what I'd do in my session, and thus log using a DEsktop/WM that will share resources with the apps I'll use during that session.

Sure having many DE/WMs installed will use loads more disk space, but on the box I'm using I have a 650GB partition thus I'm not worried about a few hundred MB of space. It's the RAM I worry about.

I'll look at what resources (esp. toolkits & libraries) an application uses, eg. with firefox on Ubuntu and using 20.04 (focal) this page will give some details (https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/firefox), with Debian trixie I'll look at this page (https://packages.debian.org/trixie/firefox-esr) and what I note is that uses GTK3 libs/tk. Thus a GTK3 desktop will be most efficient when using that app.

If you've loads of RAM I tend to ignore the app libraries/toolkits; but I don't on devices with 5GB or less, esp. with slower disks (spinning rust) etc.

Using an appropriate swap size also matters, I needed RAM to test a box, and stole half the RAM out of this current box for a day; expecting not to notice the effect... I was WRONG!! it was really slow. However a tweak to the swap and I no longer noticed the box had only half its RAM.

 

[kc1di]

Hello @brone,
Welcome to the Linux.org Forum. Enjoy!
I can not add much to what has already been said. good luck.
You may want to take a look here see if any of these suggestions will help.

10 Things to Do First in Linux Mint 21.3 Xfce

Easy tips, tweaks and tricks for Linux Mint and Ubuntu, both for beginners and for advanced users. Complete starter's guide with simple how-to's.

easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com

 

[brone]

G'day brone, Welcome to Linux.org

That system should not be hanging or freezing. it has sufficient grunt to run xfce easily.

It will not be super fast, but it should not freeze.

Is this a Laptop or a Desktop?

Have you tried another browser other than Firefox?

Hello, thanks for the worm welcome,

It's a desktop, and it's not hag or freezes all the time tho, just sometimes randomly, I mostly use telegram, firefox and Youtube through the mint web apps, and I have chrome installed but I only use it for when it really needed like for some work stuff and it's way slow to launch than firefox, and I kinda dig the privacy stuff so firefox is better than chrome, and here the distro details :

 

[kc1di]

What is the video card in your machine?

 

[Brickwizard]

What is the video card in your machine?

It says its Intel 2nd gen [the same as mine]

 

[kc1di]

It says its Intel 2nd gen [the same as mine]

I missed that I guess.
That should be no problem.

 

[Brickwizard]

It's a desktop, and it's not hag or freezes all the time tho, just sometimes randomly

Sounds like it could be the old Hard-drive on the way out. install smartcl it should be in the mint repository, and run a test on your hard-drive

 

[kc1di]

Other thing the op may want to try is disabling hardware acceleration in the browser. But @Brickwizard is right you should test the HDD first.

 

[brone]

Hi,

i suggest the small brother of mx-linux
antix

.
This distro is optimised for small hardware.

The mx linux and antix works well, but the I have a usb wifi adaptor which needs a third party driver to be installed but in antix or mx it doesn't work regardless of how many times I install it.

 

[Brickwizard]

I have a usb wifi adaptor which needs a third party driver

plug it in [depending on distribution you are using you may need to install inxi from the software manage] and run from the terminal..... inxi -Nn and copy/paste the results back

 

[brone]

Sounds like it could be the old Hard-drive on the way out. install smartcl it should be in the mint repository, and run a test on your hard-drive

Ok thanks, I'll let you know the results, although I was actually planning to get an SSD.

 

[brone]

Sounds like it could be the old Hard-drive on the way out. install smartcl it should be in the mint repository, and run a test on your hard-drive

These are the results and other details :