Cinammon or MATE on old-ish 1GB RAM netbook?

[sobakasu]

The title basically says it all!

To be more specific, currently I have Isadora XFCE edition installed which is running fairly well, can't really complain.

I'd like to upgrade to Maya, though, and would like to know if Cinammon or MATE would run better and snappier on my somewhat crappy and slow 1GB RAM netbook? My graphics are, as is to be expected, not the best, either.

I read somewhere here in the forums that Cinammon runs better than MATE on old netbooks, but then on the other hand, Unity is supposed to do so, too, and it is unbelievably sluggish, slow, unresponsive, etc. you name it.

Any help/tales of experience would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers!

[BLaZuRE]

I would go with MATE. From my experience, Cinnamon is more eye-candy friendly. I've read it also uses 3d graphics acceleration. I'd wait for other people's take on it though.

[wayne128]

From my experience, since you have been with isodora xfce, it would likely be

xfce faster than Mate and Mate faster than cinnamon on your netbook.
ram of 1G is quite good, CPU speed, harddisk speed etc place a big part too on responsiveness.

I used xfce a lots and knew how fast it works on clicking a file to open.

One last note, you should really keep your isodora xfce.
If you wish to test Mint13, dual boot it, try for a few weeks, so that you have a fairer comparison for your own hardware as well as your own habit of using computer.

[3fRI]

Xfce is a better choice than Cinnamon or MATE on your notebook, but also try LXDE, which is even a tad leaner and faster than Xfce.

[edwardr]

Clem is planning on making an Xfce version of Mint 13, if you want to wait for that. I've got Mint 9 Xfce on my laptop that doesn't support 3D and I am waiting for Mint 13 Xfce.

[AlbertP]

Mint 13 Cinnamon works on 512 MB RAM - it's using a lot of swap however. You can work around that by setting vm.swappiness=10 in /etc/sysctl.conf. You'll be able to run Cinnamon without any problem on 1GB RAM as I can run it on a 2005 laptop with 512 MB RAM and Intel GMA 900 graphics without any problem as well.
However I don't know what graphics your netbook has got. With PowerVR graphics (Atom Z series or N25xx CPU) you don't have 3D acceleration on Mint 13. Older generations such as Intel GMA 950 and GMA 3150 are fine however as well as AMD graphics; Mint 13 has a more recent fglrx driver than 12 so should work with it.

[gary428509]

LXDE. It's awesome.

[Jix]

I tried both MATE and Cinnamon on a 7-year-old HP nx9420 (ATI Mobility x1600 vid card / 3 GB RAM). Naturally my ATI drivers aren't supported on Linux so I have to use whatever custom drivers are available, which makes my CPU run twice as hard. It's basically a throw of the dice whether I can cook eggs on my laptop with each release... MATE gave me scary results because the fan wouldn't kick in; my laptop would simply keep getting hotter so I had to stop using it. With Cinnamon I ran cooler - still hot but the fan would work. Cinnamon looks nicer too, so I'll go with Cinnamon.

[SunWorks]

I'm running an HP-Compaq NC6000 with crappy graphics. Mint 11 graphics did not work. I've been thinking it's the end of the line for this machine on MInt, but now i tried Mint 13 Cinnamon and it is faster than I've ever seen it run. The whole reason I'm online tonight was to see if anybody else is finding Cinnamon Maya to be a speed demon.

Same thing with Thinkpad T43 and T60. Even running from DVD feels quicker.

I'm loving it.

This NC6000 has VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]
Memory: RIght now I've got Chrome, gedit, plus 5 Firefox windows open, each with multiple tabs.

sun@sun-HP-nc6000-DQ880A ~ $ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1001 895 106 0 15 166
-/+ buffers/cache: 714 287
Swap: 1027 393 634
sun@sun-HP-nc6000-DQ880A ~ $

and it runs great!

[AlbertP]

That's interesting, the 512MB RAM laptop I used is also from the nc6000 series - it's the 6120. It used to be working well in Mint 11 but 13 also runs quite fast even from DVD. (11 took ages to boot unless I used live USB, because the dvd drive is slow)

[takis123]

I want to ask the same. Mate or Cinammon for a classic Compaq netbook with atom 1.6 and 1 GB RAM ?

I've seen that cinnamon uses only 140 MB of RAM and MATE uses 200 MB RAM. But is MATE more appropriate for netbooks? Is MATE lighter on a netbook in terms of CPU usage and generally is a faster and lighter DE ? I realised high cpu load with cinnamon when I am browsing, but when it is idle cpu load is normal.

[BrianD]

before a few days ago, I would have said to go with Mate on a netbook, however...

I have Linux Mint 13 Maya (32-bit) Cinnamon loaded on my netbook now, and I'm impressed.

My netbook is an Acer Aspire One D250, with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom with 2G of RAM and Cinnamon runs just fine, with all the 3D acceleration stuff and everything.

I would suggest you burn the 32-bit DVD ISO to a thumb drive and try it out in the Live Session. You may be pleasantly surprised at the performance you can get out of that old netbook.

[Goro Daimon]

Choose MATE

MATE here works better than KDE, XFCE and LXDE. Here is my old Machine:
http://filebin.ca/4NdzTKom7fi

[ElQuia]

NEITHER, LXDE is the way
ASL CLEM FOR LXDE

[massexy]

I have the same specs on a 2 year-old hp netbook and MATE runs perfectly in it! If you enjoyed gnome2 good old days, by installing this you can have those glory days back again because MATE is gnome2 with a new name!

LXDE is also super fast and the Mint edition looks no different from the main edition (LXDE edition tend to look rather crappy), but unfortunately there will not be a new edition of LXDE in Mint.

[leithes]

I have a Dell Mini 10v, initially with Cinnamon now with Cinnamon and MATE both installed.
I have no particular axe to grind or loyalty with regards the underlying architecture of either desktop.
MATE runs way faster than Cinnamon; for booting up, loading programs, even just opening menus and windows.
At first install MATE looks a little grubbier than Cinnamon, but by selecting the Mint X theme (or your preferred one) and the Mint 13 Maya background it looks almost identical. The panels and menus differ slightly but hardly beyond the wit of your average Joe to figure out.
MATE also handles the terrible Dell trackpad much better, less jumping around.
Since the cosmetic differences are minimal, and speed is why I finally dropped Microsoft and went all Minty, MATE seems to be the winner here.
Hope this helps someone.

[Miami592]

In my experiences:

MATE is functional but not very speedy on a similar machine (Acer AOD250). It's OK but not speedy.

Cinnamon is much newer looking, not much faster, but I've had menu issues (needing xkill to end PokerTH). It is nearly perfect. In time it may be.

What I wound up with was a combination of Mint 13 Cinnamon with after market LXDE. Very fast, very functional, and very customizable.

Hope this helps.

M5

[sobakasu]

Thank you everybody for all your responses (sorry for getting back to you so late, going to work my way through all your posts now)!

On skimming some suggested staying with Isadora while others talked about upgrading to Maya XFCE which recently came out. I'd love to try out Maya some time but the thing is... as things are now I can't be bothered with repartitioning my HD and properly installing Mint, so I'm just using the Mint4Win Installer with Isadora (yeah, shame on me and all )

Upon skimming the release notes for Maya, though, I found nothing saying anything about the existence of a Windows Installer in the newest release... does anybody happen to know if there is one, in fact?

[ringo32]

its make a difference to which Mint system you take, ubuntu based mint, or you take lmde, my mint with switch of some option what i dont use, mate a start such as 200/212 mb only if i work with chrome it rise op too 400 to 700 mb, but with midori browsr is such lighter.. but maya xfce is nice too

[turboscrew]

Which would you recommend: Cinnamon or MATE:
(A friend's machine, not mine: I don't have more detailed specs at hand)
- about 2 years old desktop, powerful, but not state of the art
- basic stuff: net surfing, e-mail, music videos from net, messenger
- some music related SW (Hydrogen, tab-sw, note writing/playing)
- music editing SW
- Music CD burning
- home theater stuff
- maybe Seaclear or something like that (to be used in a laptop too)


What makes me wonder:

I was thinking about HW requirements (3D acceleration), finding working SW and perfo needed for smooth operation.
Also, the future of the DEs is a factor. Which one, you think, will last?
Any idea if either of the DEs is becoming some kind of "de-facto default" in Mint?
How does cinnamon work with less -common graphics cards - has there been a lot of problems?
How's the 2D accelerated cinnamon?

The laptop is (or will be) another issue altogether.