Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Mike Easter Newsgroups: alt.linux,alt.os.linux,alt.uu.comp.os.linux.questions Subject: Re: Is Debian still good for GUI stuff in an over 12 yrs. old PC? Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2021 12:09:04 -0700 Lines: 42 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net 7ir2tPmH03qLu3TuJK50GQYj9d7GLCJJ6pNy+1CQ4F1jfnBOMY Cancel-Lock: sha1:mwsQAuWH+3rLaNn6a+ySH7prX1Q= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.10.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Xref: csiph.com alt.os.linux:70917 alt.uu.comp.os.linux.questions:21 Mike Easter wrote: >> Subject: Is Debian still good for GUI stuff in an over 12 yrs. old PC? > > I don't think the Deb 11 KDE is a good fit for a low resource 2G machine > unless you are more skilled than I am to reduce its resource usage. > > If I were set on stable Debian 11 as the base, then I would choose some > other DE/WM environment which uses less resources, either from Debian or > Sparky or even MX Linux. > > If I were in love w/ the KDE environment, I would choose a 'better' > implementation of KDE which uses less resources than Debian's, > particularly KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu LTS which is based on Debian > testing. > I booted the current Sep 2 KDE Neon on my low resource 2G desktop which could 'barely run' (as in quite sluggishly) the Debian 11 KDE nonfree. It took under 3 min to boot live to the desktop; free -m reports 382 megs used. The KDE Neon runs just fine. That would be a satisfactory and VERY current KDE to use on a 15 y/o 2G machine. The Neon KDE .iso does not come w/ a full complement of apps by default, so you would add those from the repo/s, which are of course Ub-based off Debian. The default package manager is Discover, but I prefer to add Synaptic. The repo/s are the Ub Focal, main, universe, multiverse, and restricted as well as flathub and snap. If I were going to use that KDE on that old hardware, I would do it w/ Neon's, not Debian, and use the package manager (synaptic for me, or apt) to add the necessary app/s for the activities you want to do w/ it. You can add the mail and/or news agent of your choice; I see you use tin which is v. 1.2.4 in its universe repo/s. One advantage of Ub over Deb in terms of packages is the availability of .ppa/s for the specific Ub Focal release. Because Ub has a somewhat different release strategy than Deb, the balance of advantages and disadvantages to rolling vs point releases should be considered. -- Mike Easter