[ubuntu-za] Old(ish) Laptop

[Raoul Snyman]

On 17/04/2016 20:49, Bill Cairns wrote:
> My present plan is to install a full Unity system and see how it goes. 
> I
> will cut out all the fudge (I have already done that on my main system
> because I really don't need fancy). If the clunker still struggles, I 
> will
> try using Xfce rather than Unity. (This is how I ran for some time 
> before
> Unity the Windows menu in the Window title bar - Gimp just won't work
> without it).  If that is still unsatisfactory I will go to plan C. I am 
> not
> sure what plan C is yet but I will certainly look at Mate and Cinnamon 
> and
> even Lubuntu.

I have an old-ish netbook, I bought it in 2011, with an Atom processor 
and 2GB of RAM. I actually run full KDE on there (currently Plasma 5.5) 
on it, without any problems. As mentioned already, the chief culprits 
for sluggishness are the browsers (ridiculous, I know). I found Firefox 
to run the best of them all (Chrome, QupZilla and Rekonq had worse 
memory issues than Firefox, especially when you opened more than 1 tab), 
so I've stuck with that for now.

I actually tried LXQt (the successor to LXDE) and found it not much 
lighter than KDE, and less feature-full (I couldn't customise my desktop 
the way I wanted, and there were other issues missing). And of course 
once I opened a browser it didn't matter what desktop environment I was 
using anymore.

You can try other browsers like Midori or QupZilla, but I didn't notice 
any improvements over Firefox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_browsers


-- 
Raoul Snyman
e: raoul at snyman.info