Ideas for a lighter desktop environment?

**Tadaen_Sylvermane** · November 5th, 2017

+1 to the window manager idea. I ran i3 for quite some time on my laptop. Using Plasma now, only so wife can use it if necessary. I love the ease of a tiling window manager though. Learning curve yes, but once you get it you can move around and do things exponentially faster than with a mouse.

**su:bhatta** · November 5th, 2017

+1 to using WM's like Openbox .
I have used FVWM in past, and, in Ubuntu repos there is FVWM Crystal, which is built on FVWM, customised. (Remember to check out right/left click both options on desktop to be pleasantly amazed)

Both of these have suited my old hardware.
Openbox menus are helpful, so is having a Tint2 panel, and you can check out standalone programs like fdpowermon ( for laptop battery monitoring). Also, gkrellm for system monitoring.
These programs have very small footprint and helpful.

for playing videos/songs, command line tools are useful.
Do look around, choices are a plenty.

**william.hua** · November 5th, 2017

TinyCore worked out just fine. It runs pretty quickly on my old netbook. Thanks.

**kansasnoob** · November 5th, 2017

Originally Posted by william.hua

TinyCore worked out just fine. It runs pretty quickly on my old netbook. Thanks.

I'm curious what you ended up using as a browser? Web browsers have proven to be the most resource consuming app by far.

**william.hua** · November 5th, 2017

I haven't fully decided yet. Right now I'm trying Chromium. It does seem to be a bit resource intensive for my hardware, but since I have such a stripped down OS and Chromium is pretty much the only thing running on my computer that uses a lot of CPU resources, it might work out.

**help_me2** · November 11th, 2017

Originally Posted by sudodus

I agree with the previous replies.

You can try the ultra-light Puppy Linux or Tiny Core, if you need something lighter than what is possible with Lubuntu and other distros or re-spins based on Ubuntu.

I agree with these suggestions. I've always liked Puppy especially. It is lightning fast on old hardware, plus there are many variants of puppy so you can fine tune the OS for your config without too much hassle.

Or you could just do a minimal text install of ubuntu and run openbox on top of it.

**sudodus** · November 11th, 2017

Originally Posted by help_me2

I agree with these suggestions. I've always liked Puppy especially. It is lightning fast on old hardware, plus there are many variants of puppy so you can fine tune the OS for your config without too much hassle.

Or you could just do a minimal text install of ubuntu and run openbox on top of it.

I agree with your tip about running Openbox (or maybe Fluxbox or some other window manager) to get a minimal yet working graphical user environment.

See these links for more details,

help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/UEFI-and-BIOS

...minimal installed system with only a text screen add a light-weight window manager (for example Fluxbox) and the few necessary GUI tools.

**kansasnoob** · November 13th, 2017

I'm currently playing with some old desktops that have ATOM 230 CPU's and I discovered that installing the 'intel-microcode' driver improved performance considerably. I always install 'psensor' when I'm playing with things like this so I can monitor system temps as well as CPU & RAM usage. I mention the importance of monitoring temps because I've found on the P series Intel core 2 duo mobile CPU's 'intel-microcode' causes extreme increase in system temps - enough so to do real damage! But with these ATOM 230's the improvement in CPU response to activity (or end of activity) is vastly improved with no noticeable change in temps.