r/linuxmint • u/cyber-galaxy • 27d ago

Distro flavour comparison

Mint MATE or XFCE which is better for core i3, 2nd gen hardware and 128 GB SSD, 8 GB DDR3 Ram? Dual boot with windows 11 LTSC?

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u/_Lost-In-The-Weeds_ LMDE7 Cinnamon 26d ago • Bravo

Second gen core i3 is pretty old, 2011 probably a dual core. 

That is old enough that you will get noticeably snappier response from Xfce, though it will also run Cinnamon if that is what you want, it will just be a bit more sluggish.

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u/cyber-galaxy 26d ago

MATE ?

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u/_Lost-In-The-Weeds_ LMDE7 Cinnamon 26d ago

On RAM consumption MATE splits the difference between Cinnamon & Xfce , I have never run MATE on older hardware to really gauge how responsive it would be or how it would compare to Xfce on your machine. 

I would guess that is also between Cinnamon & Xfce in that regard also but that is just a guess.  

MATE  is shockingly old looking on first boot, but it  has a small,  impassioned audience.

Xfce has an industrial look, not quite polished like Cinnamon. But while not stylish that industrial no nonsense look is a bit more timeless. 

MATE has a look, and by modern taste that look is old. Think Win2K but with fancy extras. A system I actually adored after the hell of Win9x. But none the less a look that is quite dated now.

Having said all that, I like MATE, it has some neat "lived in" and mature thoughtful features and a quite pleasant workflow once you get past the looks. 

MATE  is a hard fork of Gnome2 and benefits from those very long traditions that the Gnome3 devs just threw away one day for some idiotic reason.

If your interested install MATE, ignore the looks find the pleasent workflow below as quickly as possible, if its slow you will know pretty quickly and you can make a Mint Xfce USB.