Recommended DE for weak machine?

[pmam]

I have an old Toshiba laptop (TOSHIBA 1135-S1553, Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz, 500MB RAM), and recently I installed Gentoo with KDE.
It works ok but quite slow, so I consider to Install Gnome – I am not talking on Gnome 3 with systemd (I have bad experience with it),
but on Gnome2 – I am well familiar with KDE, but do not know Gnome, so please note the exact name?
Please advise if Gnome suppose to be more efficient concerning weak machine -
If yes – let me know if I need to unmerge KDE, or can have multi DEs -
assuming have enough free space on hard drive.
Also – Should change the profile to Gnome or stay with KDE, and add relevant USE flags?

Is there another DE, except Gnome, that might be relevant to this weak machine?
_________________
“You can take our property, our sweet homes, even our cloths...
But don't touch the streets, Ah, That's NO, NO, NO!
The streets are our @world's compilable kernel ...”

[NeddySeagoon]

pmam,

You can have as many DEs as you have space for.

Try something lighter, like Xfce, which leans on Gnome and does not require systemd.
If you will keep KDE too, do not change your profile, add any USE flags you need.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[Ant P.]

I run E17 on my quad-core desktop, and I've used it on a 600MHz CPU laptop - it's equally capable and fast on both.

The key bindings aren't Windows-ized like the others though, which takes some getting used to.

[bammbamm808]

I suggest lxde, which I just started using. I really like it and it's quite lean and responsive, even compared to XFCE.
_________________
MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk
Ryzen 3900x
32Gb Samsung B-die (16GB dual rank x2) DDR4 @ 3200MHz, cl14
Geforce RTX 2070S 8GB
Samsung m.2 NVME pcie-3.0
Etc....

[Jaglover]

The only weakness I see is lack of RAM. Regardless how lean WM you use you will go swapping every time you open a fat website. In another thread people reported just opening the Facebook consumed near 400 MB of RAM. It should not be hard to get more RAM for your laptop. I have a box here full of RAM modules (I'm sure some of them would fit your laptop), I have no heart to throw it all away although finally I will. I'm sure you could shop around and find some RAM for almost nothing for this laptop.
_________________
My Gentoo installation notes.
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

[pmam]

I am going to try all your suggestions: xfce, E17, lxde - then I will see what is most suitable to me.
I assume kdm login manager can handle this multi DEs - Right?
In this opportunity, I would like to take advantage of distcc feature -
two desk top machines will help compiling of the laptop - I am going to learn from Handbook.

[bstaletic]

I would suggest a WM rather then a full blown DE.

Try {flux,open}box as it is the lightest WM of all the floating WMs. If you're willing to invest time try something like dwm or i3.

[JWJones]

[Ant P.]

[davidm]

[pmam]

I did not know about WM - Can you please put few words on the differences from DE?
Any relevant link...

[NeddySeagoon]

pmam,

The 1G RAM limit may or way not be real. It may be that 512Mb modules that were the biggest available at the time, so 1G was the limit that could be tested.

To see what the BIOS knows, run dmidecode as root. You will need to emerge it.
dmidecode | less will be better.

Bloated means fat or swollen. In the case of Desktop Environments, they contain things you will never use - that's the fat, or bloat.
A window manager is just the opposite. It gives you a window manager and very little else. If you want a web browser, add one, if you want a mail client, add one, of you want multi media applications add them.

I
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[JWJones]

[pmam]

NeddySeagoon,

I just finished to install seamonkey browser - it took very long time (I need to learn how to use distcc asap..)-
However it worthy - seamonkey seems to be much faster then firefox.

Here is full output of dmidecode | less: http://pastebin.com/bZ5zFrZU -
You can see 2 referring to max memory size - First with 1.5GB:

[Ant P.]

It sounds like your laptop might have 512MB on the motherboard and two empty slots. Either way, 512MB is the largest you can use in a single slot.

[NeddySeagoon]

pmam,

It looks like your laptop can drive three memory channels of 512Mb each.
Unfortunately, not all channels may be fitted, or as Ant P. says, there may be 512Mb on the motherboard.

If there is a BIOS update for your laptop, that may introduce the capability to use bigger memory modules.
Read about the fixes and enhacements. Also be aware that BIOS updates must not be undertaken lightly.
If the update fails, your laptop may never work again.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[szatox]

512 MB RAM is enough for comfortable use. Mind this, however: not with gnome. It's roughly as heavy as kde is.
Since you're used to kde, I suggest trying lxde. Or something else residing in "less demanding" cathegory.
My laptop definitely doesn't feel clumsy, evn though it's much weaker than your Toshiba. At least with xorg old enough to still support i810

[pmam]

OK - If I will find two low price 512MB modules it will be nice, however it is not quite necessary -
I found out that main thing caused my laptop to be very slow is firefox - probably it is too heavy for this laptop -
as I moved to seamonkey, Internet responds very fast and the whole KDE is working quite ok.
Probably there are some features of firefox I am giving up, but for the moment seamonkey seems quite enough.

Another problematic issue - long time compiling of big packages - I hope to improve with distcc -
I have some issues regarding distcc - will be discussed in a new topic...
After implementing distcc, I am going to try xfce (want to taste slightly of gnome) and the other options you mentioned here.

So after all that, I suppose to have a quite nice laptop - I see that it is too risky to play with BIOS and it is not needed.
Your comments regarding your weak laptops, you shared with us here, make me believe it is possible.
Linux and especially Gentoo offer plenty choices, and with your wonderful support,
we can find some suitable solutions to our old machines, preventing some garbage of our lovely earth.

EDIT: Last - When I think about this forum - Actually, It is like distcc... Your support are like strong servers that share resources with me -
the weak laptop client - Together we can do much better- such a metaphor -
hope asasp I will be strong, at least 2 cores cpu

Thanks you all
_________________
“You can take our property, our sweet homes, even our cloths...
But don't touch the streets, Ah, That's NO, NO, NO!
The streets are our @world's compilable kernel ...”

[pmam]

I installed XFCE and it was very nice and faster than KDE - I still have one issue:
low screen's resolution -assume it can be solved.
However, bammbamm808 suggested me here to try LXDE and it is really worth -
It is organized quite similar to XFCE, but it is faster than XFCE and screen's resolution is ok.
I installed LXDE also in my desktop and it is like an Hurricane -
Sometimes it seems the machine guess what I am going to do before hitting keyboard... I really like it!!!
So at the moment, the combination of LXDE and Seamonkey is very nice for my weak laptop.
I saw that System Rescue using Midori browser and emelFM2:
emelFM2 has two-pane design and is working fast.
Midori is very lean and fast but I did not find out how to add plugins for on-line translations and etc -
Lean is ok but not anorexia.. Is there any way to add translation to Midori?
One problem still remains: Flash does not work properly -
Can not play the clip and the colours mixed up?

Thanks you all
_________________
“You can take our property, our sweet homes, even our cloths...
But don't touch the streets, Ah, That's NO, NO, NO!
The streets are our @world's compilable kernel ...”

[zoulou99]

pmam.

for your TOSHIBA 1135-S1553, i guess you have 2 RAM's with 256Mb on each slot.
your motherboard support up to 1GB max total memory, with 512Mb max memory on each slot.
in case of "200Pin" memory DDR, so search for:

[pmam]

zoulou99,

[Jimmy Jazz]

[zoulou99]

pmam,

[Proinsias]

My current laptop is a 1.5GHz celeron with 512MB of RAM. It struggles to manage a decent browser & full DE. To avoid frustration I use a window manager, i3 or dwm. I run firefox fullcreen in one workspace, blocking adds, scripts & flash improves performance. A terminal fullscreen in another workspace to manage everything else, usually with tmux. The ranger file manager does what i need and doesn't seem to stress the gpu/ram. Watching videos in flash or html5 on youtube is painful, watching them with mpv or mplayer either streaming or after download works a treat.

Can you/Have you checked the video RAM settings? My old laptop got a new lease of life recently when i discovered I had the video RAM set to 32MB out of a possible 64MB for the past decade.

[pmam]

zoulou99,