Hi everyone. I have an old ASUS S56C and I use it everyday for web (Firefox) and graphic design (Photoshop with Bottles, Inkscape). I have used for years Lubuntu, and it was all good with LXDE ambient, but with the latest versions it switched to LXQT and with snaps I don’t feel it comfortable anymore.
So, I’m looking for another easy weight distro, no fancy, only for Firefox, Bottles and Inkscape. I’m opened to any suggestions. Thanks in advance to everyone.
If you want set it and forget, you can try immutable distros like fedora silverblue, if you use bottles for running games, you can look at bazzite. If you want to tinker, then debian/arch/fedora minimal installs and build what you want
OP seems to be running 8gig of ram, if that laptop is stock. I have actually run Bazzite Gnome on worse hardware (2 gigs of ram), but that was for the lulz, not because it was a good idea. Silverblue is Gnome DE, and OP seems to want a much lighter weight DE than either gnome or KDE.
IME, Debian is fairly minimal tinkering once you get the proprietary drivers worked out. Although I don’t know how Ubuntu handles updates, is it as (usually) hands off like the immutable/atomic distros?
Has someone tried to do an atomic/immutable distro with one of the lightweight DEs? Seems like there’s a niche there, although Mint might be similar enough from an end user experience standpoint that it’s not really worth the effort.
That’s not your question, but I’m running Kinoite (which is basically Silverblue with KDE) on a 2015 MacBook with 8GB RAM and it runs perfectly smooth.
That being said, I can’t personally recommend immutable Distros (at least Fedora’s approach to it as I haven’t tested others) to everyone. I think it fits to people who are fine with mainly using what flatpak has to offer and don’t want to tinker with their system too much, or people on the other side of the spectrum who are fine with exploring toolbox / distrobox.