Which version of Mint for ASUS X59SR Notebook?

[Haui111]

I crammed out the old stuff folks! My oldest notebook is still working. It has been used for gaming (minecraft when it was new), office work and other things and it survived with no damage. Just the battery is dead so I threw it away.

Since it used to server me well but still has windows 7, I figured I'll shred the hdd and put in on the market for someone to use. Will put on new paste and clean the fan bc its going full bore all the time.

I figured mint is the easiest to get for people on ebay so I figured I'd put that on. Now this is a 2 core @2.2 ghz pentium x64 processor T3400 with 4 GB of ram (max capacity as well) and a radeon 3470 so nothing special. Since cinnamon needs like 30% of the cpu power I should refrain from that if I want to give people a chance to actually use this machine.

So should I go cinnamon, mate or xfce?

Open to ideas! Have a good one.

 

[Brickwizard]

Now this is a 2 core @2.2 ghz pentium x64 processor T3400 with 4 GB of ram (max capacity as well) and a radeon 3470 so nothing special.

so its a 2008 laptop, it has almost the same spec as mine, I can run any Linux [some may be a bit slower] it mainly runs Mint LMDE, Parrot, Mint 21 [and a few others] LMDE & M21 are both Cinnamon, Parrot is XFCE

 

[Haui111]

so its a 2008 laptop, it has almost the same spec as mine, I can run any Linux [some may be a bit slower] it mainly runs Mint LMDE, Parrot, Mint 21 [and a few others] LMDE & M21 are both Cinnamon, Parrot is XFCE

Great! Thanks. What do you think would be best for a user who purchased this? Slow and nice (cinnamon) or fast and maybe a little less nice (mate or xfce)?

 

[Brickwizard]

Slow and nice (cinnamon)

Cinnamon is not that slow, and would properly appeal to Linux newbies, if you swap out the plate spinner for a SSD the boot time will drop from several minutes to around 50 seconds

 

[Haui111]

Cinnamon is not that slow, and would properly appeal to Linux newbies, if you swap out the plate spinner for a SSD the boot time will drop from several minutes to around 50 seconds

So, I'm trying mate rn since cinnamon took 30% cpu just to run but I'm experiencing a whole new problem. one already discussed years ago in these threads:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=282645 and

Asus X59SL-F5SL with Mobility Radeon HD 3470 - Video Problems on Install [Archive] - Ubuntu Forums

Hi, I am working on a lovely Windows-Vista-Era Asus Intel Core2-Duo notebook, preparing it for charity donation. It is in near-perfect condition, except for a weak battery. I works well with pretty much any Ubuntu or Unbuntu-based distro up to 16.04, up to but not including 16.04 with...

ubuntuforums.org

The problem is that I'm booting to the login and getting a black screen with cursor after login on the HD 3470 GPU. Dropping to shell and checking xorg log doesnt reveal anything, changing, options radeon modeset=1 in modprobe.d doesnt help either. Only thing so far was booting into compatibility mode that brought me the gui. Am now running updates (they take forever!) and then checking if that does anything.

Btw. boot times have been ok. around a minute or so, probably less.

Do you have any ideas what to do?

Edit: In case this helps with anything:

System:
  Kernel: 5.15.0-88-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.4.0 Console: pty pts/0
    DM: LightDM Distro: Linux Mint 21.2 Victoria base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: F5SR v: 1.0 serial: <filter> Chassis: type: 10
    serial: N/A
  Mobo: PEGATRON model: F5SR v: 1.0 serial: <filter> BIOS: American Megatrends v: 207
    date: 02/25/2009
CPU:
  Info: dual core model: Intel Pentium Dual T3400 bits: 64 type: MCP arch: Core Merom rev: D
    cache: L1: 128 KiB L2: 1024 KiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 1000 min/max: 1000/2166 cores: 1: 1000 2: 1000 bogomips: 8668
  Flags: ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 ssse3
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD RV620/M82 [Mobility Radeon HD 3450/3470] vendor: ASUSTeK driver: radeon v: kernel
    pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 16 ports: active: LVDS-1 empty: DVI-D-1,VGA-1 bus-ID: 01:00.0
    chip-ID: 1002:95c4
  Device-2: Suyin USB2.0 UVC 1.3M WebCam type: USB driver: uvcvideo bus-ID: 1-5:2
    chip-ID: 064e:a111
  Display: server: X.org v: 1.21.1.4 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.1 driver: X: loaded: ati,radeon
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa gpu: radeon tty: 160x50
  Monitor-1: LVDS-1 res: 1280x800 dpi: 98 diag: 390mm (15.4")
  Message: GL data unavailable in console for root.
Audio:
  Device-1: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] Azalia Audio vendor: ASUSTeK driver: snd_hda_intel
    v: kernel bus-ID: 00:0f.0 chip-ID: 1039:7502
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-88-generic running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 191 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter vendor: ASUSTeK
    driver: sis190 v: 1.4 port: cc00 bus-ID: 00:04.0 chip-ID: 1039:0191
  IF: enp0s4 state: down mac: <filter>
  Device-2: Qualcomm Atheros AR928X Wireless Network Adapter
    vendor: AzureWave AW-NE771 802.11bgn driver: ath9k v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1
    bus-ID: 02:00.0 chip-ID: 168c:002a
  IF: wlp2s0 state: up mac: <filter>
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 357.19 GiB used: 11.43 GiB (3.2%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Seagate model: ST9320320AS size: 298.09 GiB speed: <unknown>
    serial: <filter>
  ID-2: /dev/sdc type: USB vendor: Verbatim model: STORE N GO size: 59.1 GiB serial: <filter>
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 291.85 GiB used: 11.36 GiB (3.9%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda3
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 512 MiB used: 6.1 MiB (1.2%) fs: vfat dev: /dev/sda2
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 2 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2 file: /swapfile
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 70.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Repos:
  Packages: apt: 2131
  No active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list
  Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
    1: deb http://packages.linuxmint.com victoria main upstream import backport
    2: deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy main restricted universe multiverse
    3: deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
    4: deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
    5: deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jammy-security main restricted universe multiverse
Info:
  Processes: 150 Uptime: 17m Memory: 3.82 GiB used: 497.6 MiB (12.7%) Init: systemd v: 249
  runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.4.0 alt: 11/12 Shell: Sudo v: 1.9.9 running-in: pty pts/0
  inxi: 3.3.13

If nothing else helps I'm considering turning off hardware rendering for good, just because compatibility worked.

Have a good one!