cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/19622913
A friend of someone related doesn’t have a laptop nowadays, but needs one. Now we have 2 old laptops at home, and we want to give her one so she can do some things on it. Since she isn’t used to laptops and the old laptops wouldn’t run a Windows 11 (I don’t want to install a Win10 because of end of support and lacking security features), I guess installing a simple Linux is fine. Now comes the big question: Which Linux distro should I install? (see requirements below)
Laptops:
- Acer Aspire ES 15, AMD dual-core E1-7010 @1.5 GHz, 4GB RAM, 1000 GB HDD
- HP Pavilion 17-e030ez, Intel Pentium @2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM, 10000 GB HDD (I’d choose this)
Tasks:
- Office Stuff (I thought about OnlyOffice)
- Internet surfing
- Banking via Web
Requirements:
- needs to have full German support
- needs an easy software installation center
- should be easy to learn
- optionally, her friends (which probably use Windows/ Mac) should be able to help her (since she never had a laptop before)
- eventually German forum/ German Guides
I’m using Linux/ Manjaro for myself but don’t have any experience with beginner-friendly distros. I used a KDE neon for some time and also have used Ubuntu, and to be honest, they seem beginner-friendly too.
Please let me know your opinions, thanks!
Wow… thanks for this detailed info & guide! I’ll probably use the HP laptop with Mint Cinnamon, cause I don’t like that old retro look of xfce. A friend told me to try Lubuntu too, so let’s see.
I didn’t know about that Chrome/ Firefox performance “issue” on old laptops, so thank you! Isn’t there a way to disable flatpak at all? Thought on my Manjaro I could disable it, so eventually there is an option there too. OnlyOffice and uBlock were my guesses too. I’ll probably set up NextDNS and KDE Connect too.
The XFce version of Linux Mint is not the same as the default XFce. It’s been modified to look like the default Cinnamon Linux Mint. You can’t tell them apart most of the time, so it doesn’t look retro. At 600 points of cpu, xfce can run well, and work better than Lubuntu. Lubuntu is great for less than 400 points cpu, but if you have more than that, you are wasting your user experience (the xfce linux mint edition is much better than lubuntu’s in user experience).
I suggest you don’t disable flatpaks, you just disable it from the menu so it’s not visible to be clicked. But let it in, just in case it’s needed. Right click on the cinnamenu (if you install that), open preferences, and then open menu editor. There, you can make the flatpack menu entry invisible.
That guide is great. Also, you can easily find some extra ram on eBay or Kleinanzeigen. I strongly recommend adding at least 4gb. Switching from a 1tb HDD to a 128-256gb SSD should also be pretty affordable and it will do wonders speed wise.
She doesn’t have much money for a new laptop and since she won’t use it often, it’s enough to check mail, e-banking, … And we have some old laptops at home nobody uses, so we thought we could give it to her as a gift.
Eventually, she’ll buy a new ~400$ laptop later with some good specs, but that’s not in the upcoming months. But thanks for the help.
Check your pms.