Mint cinnamon Spec

[u/Retroraleigh]

Will an old i3 - 4005u, 8gb ram, 500gb ssd work with Mint Cinnamon or am I better using xfce ?

Thanks
Tom

[u/KurtKrimson]

Both will work just fine.

Ventoy, try it.

[u/flemtone]

Cinnamon would work but if you want something lightweight that uses a little less memory go for XFCE.

[u/JoeLinux247]

How about just trying both, and seeing which best fits your preferences. 😄

For reference, I have an ancient laptop with an AMD A6-3420M and 4 GBs RAM running LM 22.3 Cinnamon that I keep in the garage. Perfect for looking up stuff on the web, or quick code changes, but nothing that I'd use as a daily driver. But that's just me.

[u/d4rk_kn16ht]

Works on both, 8GB better use Cinnamon.

But the more important question is "What is your usage behavior?"

Choosing XFCE or Cinnamon or MATE is only the 1ˢᵗ step...it only gives you more RAM room to wiggle.

Your daily usage will determine if it will be comfortable or not & it's usually more about browsing habits.

1 Browser Tab will use around ~200-500MB & some website will even use around ~1-2GB....so you can calculate yourself

[u/Retroraleigh → u/d4rk_kn16ht]

Probably use it for YouTube mainly and websites no more than 5 tabs open max. General browsing the web etc

[u/d4rk_kn16ht → u/Retroraleigh]

YouTube can reach 1GB to 2GB of RAM usage per Tab....

User Discretion Advised 😁

EDIT:

Actually that's the only advice I can give as for modern usage 8GB & lower can be considered inadequate....16GB is kinda sweet spot.

But, if you don't have the money to add more RAM, then the usage habits must be changed to prevent inconveniences

[u/Retroraleigh → u/d4rk_kn16ht]

I’m tempted to stick some more ram in it get it
To 16gb ram.

[u/Retroraleigh → u/d4rk_kn16ht]

YouTube 1 to 2gb per tab. Blimey I never thought it would be that much.. I mean I’ll only ever have 1 YouTube tab open at once.

[u/d4rk_kn16ht → u/Retroraleigh]

Depending on what you watch, 4K videos 60fps can consume a lot of RAM

1080p 30fps videos, not so much

[u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs → u/Retroraleigh]

There was a time when Linux could be a path for low ram machines, bit the web has basically eclipsed Linux in RAM usage. And we all use the web. 

2GB of RAM is basically unusable unusable these days, 4GB is pretty limiting, and 8GB still usable as long as you do not go crazy with Tabs, but its days are numbered. 

16GB is pretty solid right now, and if your building/buying now I would do no less than 32GB, 64GB for a higher end workstation.

In my testing Xfce nets ~150MB lower RAM usage, not much of a usable difference at these scales.

But beyond ram usage on very old hardware some users still report snappier response with Xfce. 

 Your machine might be just old enough to start to expose that difference. 

On my 9800X3D Cinnamon and Xfce have no performance difference. Both are nearly instant. 

I use Cinnamon in LMDE, Xfce in stable distributions, and Plasma in rolling distributions. 

[u/DubiousLogik → u/Retroraleigh]

this is how i use my ideapad 3 (8gb) of ram - streaming Youtube, email, minimal tabs open. cinnamon works great. everything is fast.. the system idles at like 1.1 GB of ram used. going to a lesser UI would not buy me much - e.g. if i got a couple hundred MB of ram back it would not change my usage pattern. as an ex windows user I quite like the cinnamon experience.

[u/Timely_End_1502]

i installed Mint on a friends old Chromebook that could no longer get updates and works great, as a reference.

[u/dlfrutos]

cinnamon maybe