Any experience with really light Arch forks?

General system Applications
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short version: was gifted two ancient awful, sluggish, unresponsive, sloth-like, lost my thesaurus, Tosh. Satellites with 4GB and WIN. For now. Cheap SSD and 8GB to come.

I’ll be honest, I love ArchBang.
Liked Mabox.
Obarun was OK.
AntiX surprisingly was janky with visual stutter as if it hated it’s own Nouveaus,
I know there is more.

these all are openbox or jvm and fast, etc. this would be a minimal-use laptop so I want a minimal Arch and fast. Artix and the like were cool but too big. I think Endeavour would struggle. One lptop can barely run WIN. Painful.

THE QUESTION, finally:

Anything I need to know about uber-lite Arch distros? Pros, cons? Everything anecdotal is more valuable to me than internet research. Thanks.

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uhm well all i can say is that im on a 2010 dual core pentium , 4gig ram , and a SSD.
on EOS and it’s flying …thank you :grin:

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Why not do a regular/vanilla Arch install then add just the packages and services you need?

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maybe the SSD is making the difference then and not the 4GB? these old things have a platter drive

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an option I did not think of, thank you.

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yes the SSD definitely makes a huge difference

oh forgot to mention , i’m on xfce DE also

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have you tried EOS lightweight DE?
KDE, QT, window like experience = LXQt
GNOME, GTK, macOS like experience = XFCE

might be helpful article:

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i myself was thinking that for myself awhile back , but from what i read , it’s a real pain to get it installed ? Plus their community isn’t as friendly as here …lol

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configuring eos lxqt was the most taxing thing I’ve done! I needed a compositor and make my own configs and some tools to tweak it and it was buggy in places. Openbox or I3 I would definitely consider. Edit: thank you

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I ordered cheap SSD and have it coming.
I wonder if the paltry “2,3” ghz (feels like 1.8) of the processor limits things i.e. SSD may help for sure

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Not at all. Just need some patience. The installation guide walks you right through it. Just read through it once or twice before installing to get the workflow of the install. Whenever I’ve done it, I always have thee install guide open on another computer or phone so you can follow some links.

I have an older (circa 2011) HP with an i3 and 8GB RAM. Whenever I install a distro to it (Debian at the moment) I get the base distro and build up from the installation.

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i wonder what part of it is buggy.. you might try using kvantum manager you want to customizing it.
or if you want the latest you can activate wayland on LXQt.. XFCE i think also adopting wayland.

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see thats already a pain lol

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it was a year ago I forgot but you never forget headaches even if they are your own doing :slight_smile: ., went eos budgie, eos lxqt, then Cinnamon was the best fit so I stayed there.

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I guess my alternative motive is to find an arch distro+DE with Wayland so I can get my feet wet. Cinnamon is nowhere near ready.

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Don’t forget tiling wm like hyprland, sway, etc.
They’re probably the lightest thing around.

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Why not EndeavourOS, but if you want something different CachyOS. You can select that you want Hyprland during installation.

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not opposed to eos, just don’t have my hopes for a smooth experience with 4GB even with an SSD. we shall see

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Imho: The limiting factor that will make them feel sluggish is the GPU, then CPU, then RAM, then storage. Use the lightest desktop environment possible. Openbox isn’t a bad choice, maybe labwc.

If it runs vanilla Arch I don’t think you need a different distro, just the DE choice and GPU support would be the most important factors for a “fluid” experience moving around in the system. The “this takes ages” e.g. loading a page in a webbrowser will be the same on all distros.

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my thoughts exactly
edit: I can beef up the platter with an SSD, and beef up memory but GPU/CPU is out of my hands (and wallet)