Suppose you’ve got an old PC - for arguments sake, assume a late 2000s PC with only 2GB RAM - which DE would you choose?
Note that whilst a simple WM + some lightweight apps might be a better option, to keep things simple, I’m limiting this poll to just DEs - and too ones which are still being maintained.
Also, in case you’ve voted for a non-obvious/“other” option, I’m curious to hear about your experiences on running that DE on an old machine - and why you’ve selected it over the more obvious choices.
My PC with 4GB of RAM and an HDD is barely holding with linux mint. Tbf Mint isn’t the problem, it only takes 32% of ram compared to the 60+% of a debloated windows 10. It’s the other apps. Running a browser along anything else and Linux mint starts to struggle, even the built-in apps like the file manager and the text editor feel like they’re gonna crash the computer at any moment because of the random freezing/ delays.
My advice would be to try upgrading to 4GB and installing an SSD. Your old computer will likely only support SATA SSDs, which have a max speed of 500MB/s, but it’s far better than the 30MB/s at best that the HDD disks give.
There us no reason in 2024 to use a HDD as the boot drive.
Unless it’s all you have. Speaking as someone that’s at times been poor af, sometimes people just have to cobble up a frankensystem from whatever parts they can scrounge.
One of the things I love about linux is that it makes this reasonably possible.
You realize you could get a SSD for cheaper