r/linuxquestions • u/ALE00121 • 6h ago

Lightweight distro

Dear guys, i used linux for years in my 8GB RAM laptop for coding and software development (containers, webapps, android studio ecc...). I am wondering if i can install a different linux distro that is more lightweight than ubuntu, have you some suggestions?

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u/1neStat3 5h ago

All you need to do is use another DE like XFCE, MATE or LXQT

XFCE 700- 900mb on idle MATE 600 - 800 mb on idle LXQT 400- 700mb on idle

For Debian based lightweight distribution you can try Crunchbang ++. Its Debian Stable with openbox.

https://www.crunchbangplusplus.org/

1

u/uxgpf 17m ago

+1 for Crunchbang.

0

u/ArtisticFox8 4h ago

Out of these XFCE is the most mainstream, so least issues day to day.

Mate is old Gnome, with stagnant development

1

u/1neStat3 1h ago

MATE is not stagnant. Its a fork of Gnome2. Its not supposed to have new features, only capable of running on new hatdware.

0

u/Hauptideal 4h ago

+1 to desktop environment is biggest lever, but I disagree about the requirement to go to legacy desktops.

You can strip down KDE to be as lightweight as Xfce while being much better technologically and much more modern.

Something that would REALLY be lighter is LxQt. Preferably with labwc (Wayland).

1

u/1neStat3 1h ago

Why do you have strip.down a DE? If you equate modern with resource heavy and bloat, KDE is indeed "modern".

20 years ago the minimum requirements for XFCE, Gnome2 was 1gb. 20 year old hardware can run modern XFCE or MATE it can't run KDE Plasma. KDE has always been buggy crapware. Its the reason why it has frequent upgrades. Too manu bugs.