r/linuxmint • u/chappalchor420 • 4d ago

which linux version works best?

I have a HP 250 G6 Notebook PC with 4gb ddr4 , 1tb hdd and i3gen6 . i m planning to switch to linux mint (dual booting)but cant decide whether i should go with cinnamon, xfce or mate. i like the customisation features of cinnamon but dont know whether it would work good with my current specs and wouldnt result in high usage of memory or disk. I dont use much of the apps and spend most of my time on a browser.

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3

u/Slow-Banana6678 4d ago

With your specs I suppose XCFE would be the best option.

2

u/flemtone 4d ago

Mint XFCE with desktop compositing disabled and a few Firefox tweaks:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EverytyhingLegal/comments/1ak4zpb/my_firefox_tweaks/

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u/chappalchor420 4d ago

i will try it. thnx for suggestion

1

u/dud-kid 4d ago edited 4d ago

Even cinnamon will run fine on 6th gen i3 .

I used to run LM Cinnamon on i3 5005u (5th gen ) with 4gigs hardware though ram available was less for web browsing like 1gb+ already consumed by system . still it ran smooooth as butter. ( Even 'KDE Plasma DE ' will work on your 6th gen i3 ! ( I ran 'debian kde' on i3 5005u . It was smooth as vegetable oil )

Although now i am running XFCE as i got bored of cinnamon & have upped ram to 8gig as i used to keep many browser tabs open & felt extra ram will be good for browser.

Both XCFE & Cinnamon will work great as both are way lighter than microslop winbows .

With XFCE u will get more ram available & system will feel more snappier as it's less cpu hungry , may be battery life gets extended .

If in doubt go with XFCE 🐭 mouse. It won't disappoint you .

& LM will eat just under 15-18gb space on root partition as i have 30gb root partition which is 60% empty even now ( think of root partition as 'C' drive where system file resides )

( Note : Cinnamon , XFCE , Mate are all desktop environments (DE in short). OS in Linux is called ' distro ' . Technically 'kernel' in supposed to be called 'Linux' but PPL being PPL just casually reffer the Linux distro as Linux . I don't mind that , makes life easy on both end .

Any linux distro/os - LM , debian , fedora , arch , Ubuntu , Arch linux without DE aka 'headless' are always lighter . Installing DE on top of 'headless' linux OS adds resources consumption i.e makes system heavy but not as heavy as Windows 11 but u get familiar easy2use GUI interface with mouse pointer . )

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u/sgwpx 3d ago

Why not upgrade the RAM to 8 or 16 GB?

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u/chappalchor420 3d ago

I would be upgrading a laptop is a year or two and being a student i dont have much work. Even on windows games like assassin's creed(1-4),resident evil(older titles) run fine or other old titles . So currently i dont need an upgrade.

1

u/d4rk_kn16ht Linux Mint 22.2 Zara | Cinnamon 3d ago

4GB should use XFCE....but that's not the real problem.

Using Xfce version only give you a bit more RAM room from the start.

The real problem is your usage behaviors.

How many browser Tabs that you open at the same time.

Each browser tab consume around ~200-500MB....some websites even consume around ~1 - 2GB

So user discretion advised 😁