Hello,
To install Fedora, the distribution requires a processor of at least 1GHz as part of the minimum hardware.
But is this the base frequency or the burst frequency ?
I have a Intel® Celeron® Processor N4020 (Burst Frequency = 2.80 GHz ; Processor Base Frequency = 1.10 GHz)
Thanks,
This should run Fedora without issues as there are drivers for the CPU and Igpu within the system. I would however recommend a lightweight DE like XFCE or MATE instead of GNOME
In your opinion, would the PC not work properly with a Wayland DE ?
I think it will work, but how much RAM you have will affect how smoothly the DE will function as well. With a higher amount of ram it may smoothen out but I think Wayland will be sluggish. Due to being a bit more intensive on the CPU, GPU and ram
Maybe the KDE plasma spin of wayland might be less resource intensive? Unfortunately I do not have anything to test this with
I have 4GB RAM, and Fedora recommends at least 2 GB,
→ Hardware Overview :: Fedora Docs
I am aware 2gb is min, but that would lead to a sluggish experience with GNOME and Wayland IMO. With 4gb it will smoothen out but the processor might be right on the edge of a great experience. It was why i recommended a lower resource intensive DE. However I have heard good things about the KDE plasma Wayland and how it is less resource demanding than gnome. But I cannot answer further than that
GNOME and KDE Plasma are the only desktop environments which offer a “stable” Wayland experience and both are heavy on resources, though KDE might be slightly less. At the moment there’s 2 main options you can look into:
Fedora Sway: This might be the lightest Fedora desktop distribution which uses Wayland. However, it is a tiling Wayland compositor rather than a desktop environment. If you’re unfamiliar with what that is, you’ll have to learn about it and how to use it. It’s not intuitive like a DE and SwayWM refuses to support proprietary Nvidia drivers.
Fedora LXQt: LXQt is a very lightweight desktop environment. It does not currently have stable support for Wayland but I believe they allow you to switch to their experimental (in-development) Wayland session. If you’re okay with instability, you can give it a try and see how well it works. Being unstable, it may come with security implications.
I’ll also mention labwc. It is not a full desktop environment but rather than being a tiling Wayland compositor like Sway, it is a window-stacking compositor similar to OpenBox which should be relatively more intuitive, but it is not available as a Fedora spin so you’d need to install and set it up manually.
I run Fedora GNOME on a Celeron N3060 with 4 GB RAM and a spinning HDD. Not snappy, but still perfectly usable.
With a smaller WM/compositor and less background services it’s actually somewhat snappy and pleasant to use.
LXQT rather than XFCE ?
(XFCE has also a Wayland support goal)
A cheap trick to get a more performant and responsive environment out of Fedora Workstation is to use GNOME Flashback: sudo dnf install gnome-flashback and switch to it from the chooser on the login screen.
You still get to keep all the GNOME apps and settings without having to switch to something like MATE or XFCE or having both installed with duplicated apps.
Although if you don’t care about being able to use (or switch between) modern GNOME, then I’d say just use Fedora MATE spin in the first place for such hardware.
As a general rule, which is more important for normal use under Wayland DEs : the PC processor or RAM ?
Yes, LXQt seems to be preferable at the moment. They seem to be much further along in adopting Wayland than most other desktops (especially Xfce) and as explained, they seem to already offer an experimental Wayland session users can try today.
You probably won’t have a pleasant with this hardware. You can use it to run a few docker containers on a headless Linux server, but it is rather unsuited as a workstation. Is getting more performance hardware an option?