this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
23 points (100.0% liked)

Linux

59521 readers
479 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Dug my old laptop out (HP G60, Turion X2 64) - and installed Mint XFCE on it - so far it's useable, but of course still slow. I'm amazed it works as well as it does (3 GB ram and an SSD). The CPU usage is at 100% a lot of the time.

My question is, what distros do you guys like for this age of laptop? This is a spare so more for messing around. I was thinking of trying Arch as I've hard it's somewhat lightweight but not sure. I've really only used Debian since I've been on linux.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

100% CPU use doesnt make sense. RAM would be the main constraint not the CPU. Worth looking into - maybe a bug or broken piece of software.

Also the DE may he more the issue than the distro itself. You could install an even more lightweight desktop environment like Open box. Also worth checking whether youre using x11 or Wayland. Its easy to imagine Wayland has not been optimised or extensively tested on something like your device, and could. Easily be a random bug if the DE is pushing your CPU to 100%

There are super lightweight distros like Puppy linux.