I have a very cool Core 2 Duo laptop here that runs Linux Mint.

And it is pretty aweful. Would love to put Fedora Kinoite (Atomic KDE) on there, manual upgrades on shutdown, minimal set of apps.

But I dont know how well Plasma works on such old hardware. It is pretty bloated and messy sometimes, Dolphin and plasmashell are my biggest worries (the whole panel and widget stuff is sooo complex).

Has anyone tried Plasma?

An alternative would be LXQt with KWin once 6.1 comes out and it has full Wayland support.

  • FQQD
    link
    fedilink
    English
    56 months ago

    I tried it on a real old vista laptop once and it ran terrible, but so did everything that wasnt XFCE. But a core 2 duo might be able to run it acceptably. I say give it a try :)

  • @Xeroxchasechase
    link
    46 months ago

    I’ve got a 15 years old dell laptop and KDE neon is smooth and seemless. Booting takes less than a minute.

  • @Eldritch
    link
    English
    46 months ago

    I have KDE installed on a Core 2 Duo Tower. It runs fine most of the time. About the biggest thing you can get to make that generation of machine Snappy and more livable is an SSD. If you are still running on spinning rust there’s no way any machine is going to be considered usable by today’s standards.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      16 months ago

      True. But that old laptop has a 1,8TB HDD (no idea that was a thing back then) and is not really used anymore

      • @Eldritch
        link
        English
        26 months ago

        I don’t believe during the core 2 Duo days terabyte hard drives were a thing or at least all that common. I know I was upgrading with 128 and 256 GB drives. So that is very possibly and upgrade itself. But unless your laptop is your main system where all your data has to reside. Or you’re going to be using it for mobile video editing? Which would be pretty sketchy with a core 2 Duo. I’d honestly recommend getting a 256 GB cheap SATA SSD toss the two terabyte drive in a computer on the network to share it with the laptop if you need the storage. That’s what I’ve done with the laptop I use. Though it’s new enough to have nvme storage. But all my other data is shared over my local network via NFS

        • @[email protected]OP
          link
          fedilink
          16 months ago

          Hahaha no way I will overcomplicate this random old laptop. It is also not in my home but my families.

          But it does have 2 drives and replacing the main small one with the OS on it would already improve things a lot.

          • @Eldritch
            link
            English
            26 months ago

            Yes. Look up the upgrade process for the laptop. 9 times out of 10 its just pop the bottom off. The other 1 is like the old dell laptop I upgraded. The laptop had to be nearly 100% disassembled outside the screen. The HD was sandwiched between 3 different PCB at the center of the lower half. Bit of a nightmare. The HP, Lenovo, Acer laptops I’ve worked on we’re simple. And the ssd swap made them almost like new. I had a core 2 duo mackbook I upgraded the drive too. Made it very usable.

            • @[email protected]OP
              link
              fedilink
              16 months ago

              I have a Clevo NV41 which is hillariously easy to disassemble. Worlds bettet than my Thinkpad T430 or the better T495. Not as modular though.

              • @Eldritch
                link
                English
                16 months ago

                Good. It was a 2012is model laptop. So hopefully they learned better. That was a rediculous difficult upgraded.

  • Mint_Raccoon
    link
    fedilink
    46 months ago

    I’ve used KDE on a Thinkpad T60, it’s about 17 years old, has 3GB of RAM, and a Core Duo. It ran surprisingly well. Replacing the HDD with a SSD can also make a noticeable difference, so you should consider that if you haven’t already. I also turned off a lot of the animations and effects for better performance.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      16 months ago

      Interesting. SSD is not an option as this is not really used and has a huge 1,8TB HDD.

      And it runs very fine for its job.

      I wish plasma had a “energy saving mode” where all this fancy stuff is disabled. Transparency, blur, animations etc.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    26 months ago

    I’ve had bad experiances. Started the pc on mint with cinimon, but that had some issues so I installed xfce and plasma to see if another environment may work. Xfce worked like a dream but plasma was quite laggy.

    I’d say plasma has similar or possibly mildly better performance than win10. Any time I put it on older hardware it seems to bog it down quite a bit

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      26 months ago

      Plasma is quite a bit more resource efficient than Win11, but yes Win10 is likely pretty similar.

      I somehow can just feel the bulk, it somehow feels heavy. The panel and desktop are so modular and just feel bloated and messy.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    26 months ago

    I observed that the first boot of a new plasma install is quite slow, so that you wonder if it was a good idea to install plasma. But once everything is up, it will be surprisingly fast from that on, and it stays that fast after reboot. So, be patient you fire it up the first time …

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    2
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    Why not try it for yourself on Linux mint first by installing plasma? Plasma 5 is available on mint - I believe Fedora has plasma 6.

    I use plasma 6 on my Opensuse Slowroll laptop and plasma 5 on my LMDE desktop.

    Overall, I’ve found plasma 6 to run slightly better (I was on plasma 5 on Slowroll too for a long time).

    Once you install and try plasma 5 on your current install, that will be a much less disruptive way to see how well it works for you.

    After ricing, both plasma 5 and 6 are pretty similar on my setup. The cube desktop effect isn’t there by default on plasma 5 of course.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      16 months ago

      Okay that doesnt matter XD

      optimization for new Hardware is also important but very different from low spec compatibility.

      11th Gen Intel is x86_64-v4

      And you know what discussion came up when Ubuntu wanted to switch to v3 (my 2012 Thinkpad has v3)?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      16 months ago

      11th gen is just a few years old. Very different to trying to run something on a Core 2 Duo which is probably close to 20 years old.