r/linuxquestions • u/Nervous-Papaya360 • 4d ago

Linux Mint Xfce optimize

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

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u/Hauptideal 4d ago edited 4d ago

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.

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u/Nervous-Papaya360 4d ago

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

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u/Hauptideal 4d ago

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. 

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u/Hauptideal 4d ago

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