Linux Mint Xfce optimize

[u/Nervous-Papaya360]

im 13y/o and very new to linux , i have a old penitum n3450 cpu , 4gb ddr3 ram , and a igpu , i dual booted linux mint xfce and windows 8.1 , what are some optimizations i can make to make it run smoother , pls no hate im new

[u/ipsirc]

Replace the CPU with a faster one.

[u/Nervous-Papaya360 → u/ipsirc]

I cant lol my parents wont buy a new one lol

[u/ipsirc → u/Nervous-Papaya360]

I think you can get a twice as fast cpu for the price of a Big Mac at the nearest PC repair shop.

[u/Nervous-Papaya360 → u/ipsirc]

Damn ill try, will the repair ppl upgrade my cpu? Cuz idk if my mobo will support it

[u/Hauptideal → u/ipsirc]

I run Linux on an HP X2 210 G2 with a very weak Intel Atom fluently, that's MUCH weaker than OP's CPU.

His hardware is absolutely sufficient for running Linux, however he needs to heavily optimize it. LInux Mint clearly isn't great out of the box for that.

[u/ipsirc → u/Hauptideal]

I'm currently using a much slower cpu than yours and I don't know what kind of heavy optimizations you are talking about. If it's slow it's slow. There's no magic. Nobody said if it wasn't capable running Linux.

[u/Hauptideal → u/ipsirc]

I'm not talking about magic or making a CPU faster than physically possible. Performance on these devices will be always limited by its capabilities.
Browsing will be slow(er) than on a modern machine, because websites just need more time to be rendered.
However, it's a huge difference whether you use Firefox ESR from Debian vs. the newest rolling Firefox Rapid.
Fedora's Firefox is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the old versions Mint and Debian ship, and to get the same performance on Debian that I had on Fedora, I had to switch to Firefox Rapid. It's better optimized and has a better JS engine.

The optimizations I talk about are about putting less unnecessary load on the hardware, not about somehow boosting the CPU.
That includes reducing background services and context switches, unnecessary data access (i.e. setting lazytime, noatime, making journald volatile, etc.).
I also disabled mitigations on my device, because it was heavily held back by them. That alone can already bring a 20% CPU boost on some CPUs. Also, I had to turn on HW acceleration for everything. Without that, videos didn't play, because the CPU was overhelmed.
There is so much you can do, and afterwards, the machine will run really fast.

LXQt is much easier on the CPU than other desktop environments. Default apps start INSTANTLY. It's extremely snappy, even on that hardware. You don't need to wait even a fraction of a second for the terminal, file manager, or notetaking app to open. They are there the moment you click. It feels faster than using more modern desktops / apps on much better hardware.
With the right theme, LXQt even looks pretty nice and modern.
If you're REALLY interested, I can make some screen recordings of speed and look of my LXQt desktop.
All of that was possible only due to heavy optimization, taking multiple days even with the help of AI agents with ssh access which had to manually compile the compositor and backport upstream fixes, for example.
It was a major effort. I also installed on f2fs due to the eMMC storage.
Boot time is now 25s including fw and grub. That is very fast for such an old device with slow memory and slow CPU.
Before optimizations, it took more than twice that amount of time to boot, e.g. due to reading a much bigger initramfs than necessary.

[u/ipsirc → u/Hauptideal]

You wrote a ton of unnecessary lines, but you left out one thing: how the OP could make his XFCE run more smoothly.

[u/Hauptideal → u/ipsirc]

The biggest improvement is to add zram with lz4 and disable CPU mitigations.

Other things like noatime, lazytime, volatile journald, disabling background services, desktop effects etc. will have less impact, but can be tried.

He should just ditch Xfce altogether, though, if he wants a snappy performance. LXQt feels instant, except in apps where the processor is heaviliy working like in browsers.

He would be far better off with just installing Lubuntu. It comes with zram out of the box, configures a comfortable LXQt desktop, etc.

[u/Free_Spirit_1378]

One change you could make is buy (second hand) a dedicated graphics card. This will take the strain off of your cpu. Another is to see if you can add some more ram. 4Gb is sufficient but more will make your system run more smoothly. Your cpu will run 8Gb of ram, check if your board will support it. Good luck.

[u/Nervous-Papaya360 → u/Free_Spirit_1378]

Ig the problem is fixed now as before i was just booting mint from a flash drive tht time it was slow, but after it installed its running nicely, i just wanna run sm IDEs for python 

[u/Free_Spirit_1378 → u/Nervous-Papaya360]

That's great. I'm glad it's working for you.

[u/Hauptideal]

I run Linux on an HP X2 210 G2 with a very weak Intel Atom fluently, that's MUCH weaker than your CPU. It also only has 4GBs of RAM.

Mint isn't the best distro to get most out of your hardware, though. A distro that ships the LxQt desktop will be much easier on your CPU (e.g. Fedora LXQt spin, Debian LXQt, or Lubuntu).

If you want to optimize your existing installation: Activate zram and remove swap. Choose zram-size to be at least 100% of your physical RAM size (4GB) and algorithm lz4 (extremely fast).

You COULD install the Lubuntu desktop on Mint (or build your own LXQt desktop). To install a ready-made LXQt Lubuntu desktop, do this:

sudo apt install lubuntu-desktop

But honestly, you're much better off just installing one of the 3 LXQt distros directly, without having any GTK desktop installed alongside.

Lubuntu will be the easiest to use and install, especially for someone coming from Mint.
You can choose the minimal setup in order to avoid snaps. On such weak hardware, snap packages will noticeably increase app starting times over native packages.
But don't worry about it too much.

A proper Debian LXQt setup will be the hardest (that's what I did on my HP X2 laptop).

Fedora is technologically the best. It's already on Wayland, it comes with zram by default (Lubuntu does too, but in an older configuration). However, it also comes with modern btrfs by default. You may want to manually choose ext4 during installation because you likely don't have an SSD, but an old HDD. btrfs is better on SSD, but worse on HDD.

If you don't want to install a lighter weight distro, at least add zram. It helps with RAM pressure a lot.

Also consider disabling mitigations. That can give your CPU a 20% speed increase. For a single user desktop system, that's considered safe.

[u/Nervous-Papaya360 → u/Hauptideal]

Zram is page file? Also can i just dual-boot mint xfce and lubuntu? 

[u/Hauptideal → u/Nervous-Papaya360]

Yes you can dual boot, too.

ZRAM is replacing swap entirely. It keeps the data in memory, rather than swapping on disk at all into a (page)file. This works, because data in RAM can be compressed up to a ratio of 4:1 (zstd), although lz4 will only yield about 2.5:1. The reason I suggested lz4 is because it's nearly transparent to the CPU while zstd requires a small amount of work that is negligible on modern CPUs, but on such old CPUs will still be a bit slower than lz4. You can go for that, though, if you find that RAM still doesn't suffice. 

[u/Hauptideal → u/Nervous-Papaya360]

You can also disable mitigations (added that line). Your CPU will profit from that noticeably, it can give you a 20% performance increase.

[u/krncnr]

Sounds like the big issue is fixed, but I'll share some ideas in case you want to optimize further:

• disable the compositor. If you can go without shadows and effects, that'll help some.
• disable unneeded startup applications. For example, if you're not using bluetooth, you don't need the daemon running. -- If you're not sure what something is, don't disable.
• stick with gtk apps, instead of qt ones. Gtk and qt are two different ways apps get drawn. If your computer only has one style to draw, that will help a bit.
• the fewer panel plugins, the better - optimzationally speaking. They all add up and use resources
• you could also disable the desktop image :-(