Dug my old laptop out (HP G60, Turion X2 64) - and installed Mint XFCE on it - so far it’s useable, but of course still slow. I’m amazed it works as well as it does (3 GB ram and an SSD). The CPU usage is at 100% a lot of the time.
My question is, what distros do you guys like for this age of laptop? This is a spare so more for messing around. I was thinking of trying Arch as I’ve hard it’s somewhat lightweight but not sure. I’ve really only used Debian since I’ve been on linux.
Mh, nowadays, Gnome devs decided to have gdkpixbuf2 (image loader library) use the reimplementation glycin and that one use sandboxing via a bubblewrap process instead of kernel sandboxing, because they’re too lazy to learn it (ignorant as always).
So XFCE has currently a bug, where each.single.texture causes one bubblewrap+dbus process to spawn (usually around 20 each), so that might cause higher CPU load on already struggling hardware. Unless you’re on Arch, where you can install the “-noglycin” variant of gdkpixbuf2 and librsvg, but that’s only a temporary workaround until glycin gets pushed as default.
Tl;dr: better go with a lightweight qt-based desktop currently.
And @gnome devs; pushing some major infrastructure (because you make it convenient) and then caring only for yourself, is why the world hates the US.