SITUATION: Circumstance has forced me to press into duty a low-power gifted laptop I can take on the road. It’s a 2014 toshiba satellite. my dad got it at costco dirt cheap and since he and his wife are now old smartphone junkies he gave it to me…**. I bought a new ssd for it and bought 4GB memory for it but it’s a crappy 1.66ghz ergo: low power.
WHAT I KNOW: I’m going with a very light Arch distro. Period.
THE AUDITION LINEUP ON VENTOY:
mabox
archbang
ml4w-os (yes this is lipstick on a hyprland)
omarchy
kibaos (budgie flagship yay!)
QUESTIONS: am I missing anything in the ‘light’ arch neighborhood? Can you divulge any of your experiences good or bad with this lineup? I liked something about all of them once upon a time with Ventoy..
Thank you.
(**my dad is 80-something and way ahead of me technology-wise.)
In itself, there will be no lighter arch distro than arch itself, you might want to look into archinstaller which make pure arch install quite easy (or go directly for EOS, this is still a minimal arch setup but made easier, doesn’t really make arch heavier) and install whatever DE/WM on top of it.
I see you have choosen openbox and hyprland distros, even if my preference goes to hyprland, and even if you can make it pretty lightweight by disabling animations, transparency and such… you might also want to consider other lighter options, such as LxQt, Sway etc …
It will all depend on what your computer can run, if it goes fine with hyprland then have fun. If i had to choose between your two options, i would go for ml4w, tried both but didn’t really like Omarchy. As a third option i would also suggest HyDe.
You also have other options based on Quickshell, such as Noctalia Shell or Dank Material Shell which will make setting up an Hyprland env way easier but i don’t think this will be lighter than the others, quite the opposite (will need advice from people using it to compare)
But again, unless it looks fine after testing it, i would suggest looking for lighter alternatives.
Sorry for the messy post, i’ll try to make a more constructive one after i get some sleep
Ml4w and Hyde will pretty much setup a full DE experience out of the box, while Noctalia and DMS (while still pretty much complete) will still need installing a few more packages for the same results. Yet, once setup Noctalia and DMS will probably be way easier to modify/customize without having to learn how to modify lua/bash scripts in ML4W or HyDe
But yeah, you might want to look into lighter options if your laptop can’t hande it : LxQt, Sway, i3 etc… can’t say about openbox as i have never used it
interesting. I don’t want to modify any .conf/bash to great extent. I did enough of that in LXQT if you can believe it..
..I really like Mabox but don’t know the Manjaro Way at all and you sold me on a basic Arch base which I will find the ISO for now. Thank you again for the great info.
I might need to correct my previous post, if you just want to change themes, wallpapers, bar layouts and things like that, you won’t have to modify any config files for either Ml4w or HyDE, this will only happen if you are an idiot like me and want really specifics things to change and turn it into your own specific setup
I inherited my mother’s old laptop, a 2013 Acer with only a 1.5GHz dual-core non-multithreaded, 4GB RAM and a smallish (by my standards) SATA spinning-rust drive.
Initially I put another 4GB in it and replaced the SATA drive with a SATA SSD. That did a world of good. I’ve since put in 16GB which helped some more, although not the night-and-day of the 4 to 8 bump. (I still have the pair of 4GBs I took out. PM me if interested. Free, BTW. They’re just going to waste now.)
It is currently one of my two Arch boxes. I used archinstall on both. Yes, yes, it’s not The Arch Way, but since it’s on the ISO, it is legitimately An Arch Way. There is no way to have a lighter Arch than one where you made every decision (guided by archinstall) yourself. No extra fluff.
In use, it is faster than you might expect. Still, patience is a virtue and you’ll need to be virtuous with it. XFCE would be a smidge lighter and faster, but I’m committed to Plasma and have no complaints. And forget multitasking, beyond maybe two apps, say a browser and something else. The poor little processor can’t keep up with much more than that, unless you are really virtuous.
It’s a fun little box to have around and I use it for all my testing before upgrading my others.
It’ll work just fine, even with Plasma. I use Vivaldi simultaneously with LibreOffice on it all the time with ProtonVPN and Syncthing in the background.
Well, apart from a few scripts and helpers, EOS will only install what you would very likely have installed on a pure Arch system anyway (drivers, basic apps like Firefox etc…), so yeah, might be the simplest solution and reeeeeealy close to pure Arch.
the RAM had one slot so the 4GB is it for now until RAM comes down in 2053…but I swapped the platter for an SSD and you are right: snappy as *&^%. Sometimes I have wondered if SSD was truly the difference maker…you got 1.5 too
Sure, not a problem. If you keep your expectations reasonable and don’t start clicking all over the place when it experiences a delay. Again, patience is a virtue.
The biggest delays I experience are when syncthing is doing a fairly hefty (20GB or more) sync and I really really want to run pacman at the same time. That bogs processor, processor cache, WiFi, and drive I/O all at once. Refrain from silly stuff like that and you’ll be okay.
No, I was meaning 20GB of syncthing–data stuff from my other computers. I like to keep the data in sync between all my PCs so it doesn’t matter which one I use. That plus pacman is rough on the poor little thing.
This.
Get installing!