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.

  • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    8 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.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
      1·
      8 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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        8 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

        • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
          1·
          8 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@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            8 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.