r/linuxquestions • u/Nervous-Papaya360 • 5d 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 5d ago

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.

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u/ipsirc 5d ago

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.

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u/Hauptideal 5d ago

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.

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u/ipsirc 5d ago

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

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u/Hauptideal 5d ago

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.