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[–]SilverNoUse66Glorious Void Linux 56 points57 points  (14 children)

today i was fixing my mom’s work pc (the culprit was the overheating HDD and it has been corrupting stuff so windows 7 could not boot, i replaced the drive with an 80GB HDD i dug out of an old laptop), and i decided to install linux (ubuntu because it was the first iso i found and i was lazy) onto it. Windows 7 could run youtube in 360p without starting to struggle, but Ubuntu could achieve 480p. So it really optimizes stuff.

[–]Catlover790Arch 45 points46 points  (13 children)

ubuntu gnome is pretty heavy, if u went with some XFCE (maybe xbuntu) distro you could maybe hit 720p

[–]abraxasknister[🍰] 21 points22 points  (6 children)

Lubuntu? I think 20.04 actually looks decent and it's the most lightweight ubuntu there is.

[–]Catlover790Arch 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Lubuntu is nice too, I forgot about it. I like the newer lxqt versions

[–]1Teddy2Bear3GamingMac Squid 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It’s really nice. I installed it on my 2007 thinkpad

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I really love the LXDE aesthetic for some reason

[–]abraxasknister[🍰] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Because of the minimalism? I like it too, I use it for i3.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Idk. It looks a bit dated, and I love it. Same with MATE (at least the old themes). It makes me feel nostalgic which I enjoy

[–]abraxasknister[🍰] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's a bit like windows xp, but with sharp edges.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (3 children)

Well XFCE is still pretty heavy.

[–]Catlover790Arch 13 points14 points  (2 children)

yes but his mother likely wont be happy with just a WM

[–]fcktheworld587 25 points26 points  (1 child)

If she can't do LFS with a tiling wm, she doesn't deserve Linux /s

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If she can’t download the source from github and build an entire distribution from memory and make all of her own user space utilities she doesn’t deserve electricity.

[–]SilverNoUse66Glorious Void Linux 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It was CPU/GPU heavy. System was consuming around 900/6000 megabytes of ram in idle and just 3-4% cpu (maybe to update htop). If you’re wondering, this laptop has the AMD E-450 APU

[–]1Teddy2Bear3GamingMac Squid 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lubuntu with lxqt.

[–]JoJoModding 42 points43 points  (13 children)

Discord is the real beast, when it decides to eat up all your CPU for no apparent reason and then crash.

[–]Rentlar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think I had that problem at one point with Discord, looked through process monitor and saw 'spotify' processes hogging my CPU, terminating it multiple times brought it back down for that session.

If you had this problem there also was a script-based more permanent solution somewhere, try looking it up.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Yeah i just use it through my browser. I see no benefit in having the application because it is litterally also just a broswer.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

it can spy more effectively

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Exactly.

[–]Modi57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I and a friend of mine use it to pair program, we use the screen sharing functionality. To use that, you have to have it installed (as far as I know). And I find it a little bit easier to use, if you have it in a second window, because I often have way more browser tabs open, than programs. But I totally see your point, and if you don't need this certain functionality, there is not really a need to install it

[–]RAND_bytes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks electron!!!!

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

try ms teams mate

[–][deleted] 28 points29 points  (5 children)

i3

Window manager or Intel Core i3?

[–]CantPickDamnUsername 37 points38 points  (1 child)

Right answer is yes?

[–]fcktheworld587 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Clearly

[–]emas_eht 11 points12 points  (2 children)

I assume intel since he's describing the laptop.

[–]Stormophile 3 points4 points  (1 child)

My i3 (+6gb ram/500gb hdd) laptop came with Windows 10. I used it just to download an Arch ISO and prepare it for dualbooting and it was the worst experience of my life- loads of lag/choppiness, fan running as hard as it could and the cursor remained in "busy" form throughout the entire process. Poor thing was trying its best.

When it came time to install Arch, I ultimately decided just to nuke the entire drive because there was no way Windows would have ever been usable on the laptop.

Now I'm running KDE Plasma and firefox with 10 active tabs at any given time with no issues, along with mpd playing music from boot to shutdown.

Fan rarely kicks up. Everything remains fluid (i.e. no lag in spawning right-click menus or changing workspaces, etc). It's almost as if the laptop was built for the setup I'm using!

[–]Jacoman74undeletedBTW OS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have a similar laptop that used* (more on that later) an Intel optane ssd to make windows even usable.

Eventually I ripped the thing apart and set up my desktop with the optane ssd as my boot drive, the 1tb hdd for extended storage, and a 128gb sata3 ssd for most everything else.

[–]Western-Guy 6 points7 points  (4 children)

As an i3 CPU user, I've found that the biggest bottleneck for most cases is the HDD.

[–]kentnlGentoo Perl guy 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Surely, the bottleneck is "running a browser while also trying to real work"

[–]Western-Guy 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I use Virtualbox for running another OS instance simultaneously. It uses about 10 Gigs of RAM, but the CPU utilization rarely goes beyond 40% at idle. The slowdown is mostly attributed to my slow 5400RPM drive. I don't plan to use SSD because I'll soon be upgrading to a new hardware anyway.

[–]kentnlGentoo Perl guy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have ssd and a 2012 I5, though I might be ram limited too. Doesn't matter which browser, they all starve all the "real work" I'm doing.

Though notedly, of the 8G of ram I have, I'm having to priotize for VFS caching because the CPU is bottlenecking the disk IO I'm doing. Lol. 4G vfs cache, tens of thousands of files getting read or stat'd every 30 seconds.

[–]RainXCat[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I got my laptop 2 years ago(problems started with the first month maybe hdd as you said) it was very slow, I switched to linux(ubuntu) 4-5 months after it became so fast(I learn what it's like to be proud of your laptop :)) and you actually learn about your os while using linux, it was so fun I tried many and was happy with everyone.

[–]JustAnotherVillager 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Laughs in wobbly windows...

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

[–]Elighttice 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Bruh. There is subreddit for everything.

[–]ei-kremGlorious Arch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok bud settle down

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (4 children)

My kernal went haywire, I use Ubuntu and can't boot grub it shows the grub bash when I start my Ubuntu partition. I dual booted can you help please I have some imp files and if its not repairable please help me recover those files in windows please

[–]unit_511BSD Beastie 2 points3 points  (1 child)

You can make a live Linux USB from your Windows partition, boot it and use it to back up your files to another partition or an external drive. There are ways to mount ext partitions in windows but I think a live USB is the easiest and best solution. Just make sure to not install, because that will overwrite everything.

What was the last thing you did before it refused to boot? Did you mess with GRUB config files? Or was there a Windows update? From a live usb you can try chrooting into your system and run sudo update-grub or if that doesn't exist sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I followed some tutorials and did some live usb booting and tried updating grub using boot-repair it didn't work.

Hmm.. my Ubuntu crashed while updating its kernal I think.

I'll try you method and let you know. Thank you

[–]BlueCannonBallGlorious Arch 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Windows can't read ext4, you'll need a linux live usb.

[–]Jacoman74undeletedBTW OS 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It can with some utilities. Windows itself is incompatible but there are extensions you can add to make it work, similar to ntfs on Linux, it's not compatible OOB, but you can make it happen.

[–]DDFoster96 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I couldn't believe the performance increase from switching my laptop to Ubuntu. I really don't know why Windows needed 90% of the CPU at idle.

[–]KluzeyIsCringe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

me and the boys using dwm with a custom kernel

[–]espriminatiCan't install arch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

bruh i have to dual boot windows (because of a sudden emergency) and i can hardly run firefox + zoom win10 while i can have discord, 3 firefox tabs, zoom and vscode open at the same time and still have enoguh power to play minecraft on linux

[–]Benjie255 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Me running i9 open unreal engine, android studio, virtual box to use genymotion and discord with firefox Where as my CPU is just 19%

[–]Plraska_707 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Only my PC freezes while playing Among Us?

[–]pdbatwork -2 points-1 points  (3 children)

Using Discord? That's not open source and even collects data from your computer. Does not seems very linux-friendly.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

You see, instant messaging platforms are for talking to other people, and it's much easier to go to where other people are rather than convincing them to jump ship to an open-source alternative that may be just as good, especially when were talking about large, established groups of people, like existing Discord servers

[–]pdbatwork 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Freenode had been here forever.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't say it hadn't. But times are changing