Which lightweight Linux distro would you recommend for a beginner - intermediate user ? I have an old laptop (4 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD, Intel i7-4500U (4) 3 GHz CPU).
Every Linux Distro performs roughly the same under the hood. The difference lies on the used Desktop Environment (like how the Desktop looks, popular DEs include GNOME, KDE Plasma or Xfce).
What I would recommend is to use a recommended distro from the Privacy Guides Team like Fedora with either KDE Plasma (my recommendation, because of the support of Wayland for GUI isolation) or LXQt (if KDE Plasma performs more badly than good on your laptop) as the desktop environment.
You can download the ISOs on the official Fedora “Spins” site:
https://spins.fedoraproject.org/
But if you have the possibility of upgrading your laptop, then I would highly recommend to change your HDD with a SSD and maybe upgrade your RAM to 8GB (or even 16GB RAM if you need it).
You could also use openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment as well.
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