Help please! Install/migrate/downgrade

[ryan211]

Yes I know the topic is install and upgrade. Sorry if I should of chosen a different topic.

I have an old laptop core 2 duo etc. I have ubuntu 14.04 lts running but I want to downgrade to something very light weight. I heard Mint is a good choice. I just was wondering the best way to going about it without losing all my data. I am new to linux so any help would be very appreciated. Thanks

[kc1di]

Hello ryan211 and Welcome to Ubuntu & Linux
Mint is a good Distro but it is based on ubuntu 14.04 and would not be much lighter. What desktop are you using now if it's unity you would benefit from changing to a light desktop enviroment, such as mate, xfce. or lxde you may want to try out lubuntu or xubuntu or ubuntu-mate - They will run better on your equipment.
if you need something lighter than those i would suggest Anti-x.

In any event give us a little more info on your system and we would be able to give better advice.
as for the saving your info -- that again will be hard to tell you what to do unless we know what's already installed and if you have a seperate /home partition or not.
it can be done. But my advise is to save any important documents and files to an external media of some sort and do a fresh install.

Good luck

[vasa1]

... I heard Mint is a good choice. I just was wondering the best way to going about it without losing all my data. ...
You could ask the person (or source) who recommended Mint to you. That way, you won't get conflicting advice.

Mint has its very own forum: http://forums.linuxmint.com and I'm sure all your queries on switching to Mint will be comprehensively answered there.

[ajgreeny]

And don't forget there are several different versions of Linux Mint with a similar range of desktops as Ubuntu, though not with unity, as far as I'm aware.

Go for one of the light DEs such as LXDE or XFCE and you should be fine with that machine, although it would be very helpful to show us more specs than simply "old laptop core 2 duo etc."

[grahammechanical]

I have a Core 2 DUO with 1 GB RAM but I also have a video adapter with 1 GB of video memory & it can do hardware accelerated 3D rendering that is required when running Ubuntu + Unity. And so I am very pleased with the user experience I get with Ubuntu. The video adapter is the key component in this type of discussion.

On Ubuntu we can install gnome-session-flashback. That will give us a different user interface and importantly allow us to run the UI on a different window manager/compositor. Metacity instead of Compiz. Or, is it Mutter? It does not matter. :)

As previously noted, there are Ubuntu family members (distributions) that use a different window manager/compositor by default. As well as Xubuntu with Xfce & Lubuntu with LXDF, there is Ubuntu Mate which uses the Marco window manager but with an option to run under Compiz.

Regards.

[kansasnoob]

If you're running Ubuntu Trusty (14.04) and not another flavor you can easily install and run the much lighter flashback w/metacity DE:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2220264

Then going forward with 16.04 you could try one of the other Ubuntu flavors such as Ubuntu Mate, Lubuntu, or Xubuntu, all of which are lightweight and well maintained. Or you can switch to some flavor of Mint, but these are the Ubuntu forums, not the Linux Mint forums :)