So I have a laptop from 2015 with an i5-5200U CPU @ 2.20GHz, dual channel 8gb ram, and a 1tb HDD. I got this laptop for free from someone giving it away, and since I already have a newer one for my general tasks, I was mainly hoping to use this one for older games (90s-2010s) and using CDs and DVDs with its disc drive as I don’t have another one. I was also considering running a Monero node on it if possible. Btw, I’ve used a few Linux distros before like Fedora Workstation/KDE, Silverblue, and Tumbleweed for about a year, so I wouldn’t consider myself a complete beginner, but I’m still definitely still a noob, so be prepared for some noob questions.
Right now, I’m using OpenSuse Tumbleweed with XFCE on it and it runs, but just feels a little unresponsive and the CPU gets used up quite often. I’ve been having some issues running any games through Lutris as well. For some reason, Half Life runs great but none of the other games I try will even launch. This has been making me think about switching to a more stable distro like Mint XFCE or MX Linux. I know that it’s worse for security, but I figured that I have older hardware so I wouldn’t get as many benefits from a rolling distro like I’m using now.
Another thing I’ve been debating is KDE Plasma vs XFCE vs LXQT. I have a feeling that KDE Plasma will be harder on my resources than the other two options, enough that it wouldn’t be worth the Wayland support. And would Wayland even work properly with an older laptop like this? I’ve been liking XFCE’s simplicity compared to the KDE use I’ve had before on a different PC. I don’t know much about LXQT, but I’ve heard that it’s lighter than XFCE and has Wayland support, so that might be a good option. I definitely don’t want to use Gnome because I dislike their view of how a DE should be.
TLDR: I have an older laptop from 2015 that I intend to use for playing older games using Wine. I’m trying to figure out what the best distro/DE option would be for me, and if it would be worth the tradeoff of using a stable distro/x11 DE.
First step would be to find out why this happens, benchmark before and after to not leave space for “feels” but have actual numbers (temperature, CPU usage, amount of RAM available etc).
Not sure if the problem is the distro itself here or the launcher/way you launch your games.
Also, if you’re on a HDD (probably 5.4k RPM), games might need to take some time to spin up/etc, double-check that it’s not just buffering the assets or something alike.
Can definitely add some overhead, not sure if it’s critical. Mostly depends on the rest and if you have use of fancy transparency, border shadows etc.
Wayland is just a piece of software to draw things on your screen, it doesn’t require any specific hardware[1], subscription or nonsense AI to run properly because it’s based on standards and better-written software.
Subjective haha. Why not just installing some SteamOS or alike?
I mean, it depends of the games but you could maybe use a retro gaming distro (like the ones for the Pi) where you don’t even have the overhead of the desktop fanciness, just enough UI to launch the games.
TDLR: the DE doesn’t matter neither does the rest since the games you want to play can probably run just fine on 512 MB of RAM.
I played DOOM on a Raspberry Pi 2, like 10 years ago just fine.
Thank you for your response. I’ve been using the laptop for a few days and I think I’m just going to put a server OS on it and self host stuff like XMPP on it instead as I don’t get any benefits from using it over my Macbook which I already had. Most of the retro games out there can be played on Mac with things like macsourceports.
And most modern machine is overkill (hence totally capable) or running some games that require very small amounts of horse power. Good call to just use the Macbook.
none of these DE is lightweight at all. recently i tried xfce it consumed 1gb+ ram (after boot) xfce vs lxqt there is only 100MB difference so its not worth if you want more lightweight option with wayland support uses voidlinux + niri wm. also make sure when you download volid linux iso download the base image only not the xfce edition. its just easy to install but its cli you can find videos on youtube for walkthrough guide.
