I wonder what recent PC comes with a dual-core processor and 4 GB of RAM? I’m not doubting you, just genuinely curious if you don’t mind sharing.
Fedora’s LXQt spin should provide similar security as GNOME and similar resource usage as Xfce. I’m not sure if it uses Wayland by default but Wayland should be stable on the latest version of LXQt, you just might have to manually switch to it.
I don’t see why full disk encryption would be extra burdensome on your device?
I’d say if it works well on a live USB (while running multiple applications you’d typically use) then it should work well if you install it. But if it doesn’t work well, that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t run on your laptop as live USBs in general tend to be more sluggish.
In any case, if you just want the security benefits of Wayland I’d try LXQt before trying to run GNOME on a low-spec device.
If the RAM isn’t soldered, I urge you to try and find another 4GB or 8GB stick.
Even with the current RAM pricing issues, small size sticks haven’t increased much and you can always go spelunking dumpsters in corpoland.
edit: it seems that E410 has only soldered RAM, instead just try to find a whole computer, it shouldn’t take too long.
I’d recommend Fedora with MATE with the junk pruned off, should idle at around 600MB usage. You can probably setup a minimal Arch that idles even lower at like 450MB, but you might lose some functionality or convenience.
If you want to absolutely maximize memory usage you can find a 32-bit PAE distro, but I’m not sure if many of those exist anymore.
encryption does add overhead, especially if AES acceleration isn’t available. @PaulF
you can check if AES acceleration is available: grep aes /proc/cpuinfo
or benchmark it: cryptsetup benchmark -c aes-xts -s 512, you want above 500MBps
if it isn’t you can use adiantum which is fast on such processors: cryptsetup luksFormat -c xchacha20,aes-adiantum-plain64 -s 256 <device>
Which DE would have the best Wayland support, between LXQt and MATE ?
On the GNOME forum, some users have emphasized the role of the number of running apps, in the RAM consumption ; according to them, a limited number of applications (no Discord/Element…) would allow GNOME to run with 4 GB.
As I am by no means an expert, I try to gather as many perspectives on the subject as possible in order to achieve a satisfactory result straight away… For example, I still don’t understand why GNOME and KDE use more system resources than other DEs, when it is possible to benefit from Wayland with a more minimal DE (LQXt) (so we can’t say that Wayland itself is more resource-intensive than X11).
On the other hand, can using a desktop environment such as GNOME on a device with low RAM lead to significant battery consumption ?
I haven’t yet been able to determine precisely what advantages I would gain from an atomic version of Fedora, but a recommendation in another thread has prompted me to go straight for that version (Atomic).
If I have to rule out Silverblue and Kinoite because of this RAM issue, that leaves three options : Budgie, COSMIC, and Sway.
It seems to me that these others DEs were selected by Fedora because they all work exclusively with Wayland :
The good news is that Budgie and COSMIC are lighter than GNOME and KDE.
Apart from that, I don’t know how these 2 DEs differ, or whether one is more interesting than the other (maintenance, security, ergonomics, etc.). User feedback would be welcome…
(This site provides a comparison of the hardware resources required for some DEs, but it does not mention COSMIC).