A few years ago, LXLE was my distro of choice for older hardware.
I haven’t used it in a while, and now I’m trying to revive an HP Stream (AMD/4GB RAM/32GB SSD).
Anything else I might want to try first, or is LXLE still considered good for lightweight/feature rich?
- don’t know enough about LXLE itself as a distro
- but LXDE should effectively be considered “end of life”, the developer is in the process of porting everything over to Qt and working on releases of LXQt
- with that, for a full DE – Xfce if you like GTK, LXQt if you like Qt
- or a minimal setup with a WM plus utilities (like Openbox or one of the large selection of tiling window managers)
- along those lines though, there are still a LOT of lightweight Linux distros to choose from
- Crunchbangplusplus or BunsenLabs – successors to Crunchbang Linux – usually just Openbox WM and a few utils rather than a full DE
- plain old Debian stable – proprietary drivers are now part of the installer, no more hunting for a special ISO – can choose your DE or WM during install
- Alpine Linux – popular for server and container installs, but has its fans for desktop
- DistroWatch’s selection for Old Computers – LXLE is still on the list
I can second Xfce. I’m using it on the chroot Linux I run on my phone. It doesn’t get much lower end than that, and Xfce performs perfectly.
And it feels much more polished than LXDE.
Thanks for all this info. It’ll help me catch up, I’ll check out your links.
Try AntiX or MXLinux
Yes, use what you know. Neither LXLE nor LXDE are end of life as claimed in other comments. The latest LXLE release is supported until 2030, which is five years longer than Windows 10.
I appreciate your response. it’s good to know I’m safe running what I know. And cerement gave me some good info so I can learn more about different distros. :)
I tried installing LXLE - and in spite of multiple attempts, it simply refuses to install the boot files into the boot partition. 🤣
So I suppose it’s getting a different flavor, after all