Am I overthinking? Mint Cinnamon/Edge/MATE/xfce/ for a T480?
Am I overthinking? Mint Cinnamon/Edge/MATE/xfce/ for a T480?
The propaganda worked. I bought a Thinkpad, the thigh highs are on the way, penguin stickers are already here. Now it's time to actually put Linux on my machine.
I'm a bit lost on which version of mint to put on the T480. It's an i7 8650u, 16gb RAM, 256gb SSD (will eventually be upgrading the RAM, SSD, and display). My question is, is the t480 "old" by Linux standards? From what I've gathered cinnamon is the standard version. Edge is for new (?) hardware that may not be fully compatible with cinnamon. MATE is for old/lower power hardware that can't handle the demand of cinnamon and xfce is for even older/slower hardware.
I've been running in circles all morning trying to find experiences of people with a T480 who are running mint and which version they're using. Old is apparently 3+ years according to various articles trying to convince me to upgrade and I haven't found much on what is considered old hardware for Linux. As someone who hasn't bought a computer in nearly a decade, a quad core processor with 16 gigs of ram is ridiculously powerful. My last computer was a $90 shitbox that I got on clearance from Walmart in 2016 to do online lessons in EMT school. So my perspective/experience is utterly useless.
Can a T480 run Mint Cinnamon 21.3, or am I better off using MATE/xfce? It's going to live a pretty easy life. I'll mostly be using it to browse, stream music, do (online) homework, write papers, and put books on my e-reader.
Theses are modern specs by Linux standards, you are not limited in the slightest for choosing your favorite desktop environment.
On a side note, and old PC that would require a "lightweight" distro would be more like a 12yo PC with 4GB of RAM.
That makes sense. I eventually found out that "heavy" in Linux terms is like 700mb RAM at idle haha. Much lighter than windows
Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE4 are all pretty light weight, though XFCE4 may be the most light. Having tried all three of them on an older Thinkpad with less RAM I think you will be pretty comfortable with any of them.
And welcome to the club ! :-)
Hey, I forgot to get back to you yesterday but I appreciate it! I've got mint Cinnamon up and running. I was overthinking haha, it's honestly surprising how stress free the whole process was. Thanks again!
KDE
Installing or removing kde on linux mint could be difficult for a new linux user.
Well then don't use mint =D
Like Synapse also said, your computer is plenty powerful and modern by Linux standards.
Stay away from lightweight desktop environments like Mate and XFCE. They are perfectly OK, but not necessary unless your hardware is really old like 10++ years. You dont have to limit yourself to just "OK"
Mint Edge is for new (last 1-2 years) hardware that is not compatible with Mint (which is based on the Long Term Support versions of Ubuntu, which are released every two years). I saw some news that in the future Mint will not have a separate Edge version, and just make all versions the Edge version, so don't worry too much about.
One little caveat though, 256GB SSD isn't all that much these days. For most stuff it'll be fine, but you should probably avoid installing Flatpaks as they can be quite space-hungry. Native Mint (Ubuntu) packages are usually good enough, just know that most apps will be old, since they're only updated every two years when there's a new version of Mint (and Ubuntu LTS). If you buy a bigger SSD just forget about this last paragraph :)
Thanks! On the SSD bit, I actually got really lucky yesterday. I couldn't find a thumb drive anywhere in my house so I ran out to get one from the store. Next to their thumb drives, they had a ton of m.2 nvme cards on clearance. I snagged a 1tb card for $40 so I'm all taken care of on that front!
Great 😃 Although... $40 for 1TB nvme sounds suspiciously cheap. Hopefully it's just cheap cause of the clearance sale. Make sure you do regular backups. TimeShift is good for backing up the operation system, but find something to back up your user-data as well.
I've found with cheap SSDs one way they fail is to fail on writes, leading Linux to remount the filesystem as Read-only.
Try cinnamon, if it laggs or you do not like it try something else.
I gave cinnamon a shot and it runs perfectly, no complaints!