I want to revive an old Lenovo laptop with an AMD A6 2.6GHz and 4GB ram, what would be the best option for a DE?
Try KDE Plasma, you can strip out a ton of it, for example XOrg entirely, baloo, animations, etc.
Got any guides on how to strip plasma down to the bare necessities? I have it on a machine with 4 GB RAM, but I don’t know how to optimize it for such old hardware.
I updated this project once. This is a very good start on what packages you need.
There are metapackages different for each distribution, like plasma-meta on Arch or plasma-workspace on Fedora.
This may be too bloated, but leaving out some core components (like infocenter or display) may result in random Systemsettings pages missing.
Also on Fedora, the “Netinstall” “minimal” variant is impossible to include wireless packages (“hardware support” group) so it is easier to start from a normal KDE install and just remove things you dont need.
Some things are also settings like balooctl disable && balooctl purge
