would mint run smoothly

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Charbel4
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would mint run smoothly

Post by Charbel4 »

hi guys, i was wondering if i could run mint cinnamon smoothly with this specs, (i mostly game and serf the web on my laptop) or should i go for the xfce edition. thanks for the help in advance ^^

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 system: VivoBook 15_ASUS Laptop X540UBR
          RAM: 4 gb ddr4
          CPU: Intel Core i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz (Quad Core, each core with the speed of 800 mhz)
          HDD: 1TB ST1000LM035-1RK1
          GPU: NVIDIA GM108M [GeForce MX110]
           
           
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kc1di
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by kc1di »

Looks good more ram might help. You'll have to run the Nvidia Graphics card with Nomodeset (see install notes).
I'm not familiar with your HDD but most of the work well in Linux.
Good Luck.
P.S. Best way is to try it from live usb and see if everything works.
Last edited by kc1di on Wed Mar 31, 2021 5:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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RollyShed
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by RollyShed »

Charbel4 wrote: Mon Mar 29, 2021 1:48 pm hi guys, i was wondering if i could run mint cinnamon smoothly with this specs, VivoBook 15_ASUS Laptop X540UBR
As I put Cinnamon on everything and what you have is way over speced compared with some I've setup, I can't see any problems.
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Moem
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by Moem »

I believe that a bit more RAM, if that is feasible, would make for a better experience. Can you get it to 8GB?
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AndyMH
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by AndyMH »

Moem wrote: Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:31 am I believe that a bit more RAM, if that is feasible, would make for a better experience. Can you get it to 8GB?
I agree with Moem, but my first priority would be to replace your HDD with an SSD. You will see a significant speed increase. Given your specs, I'm guessing you probably have a slot for an M.2 drive (nvme) which would mean you could keep the 1TB HDD and use it for something else, e.g. data storage or backup.
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JoeFootball
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by JoeFootball »

Charbel4 wrote: i was wondering if i could run mint cinnamon smoothly with this specs, (i mostly game and serf the web on my laptop) or should i go for the xfce edition.
Another option would be to install both on the same system, and see if one performs better or has something that appeals to you.
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by Petermint »

4 GB worked for me until I started editing video and big files from a scanner. I now do those tasks on a 16 GB desktop. Windows 10 is equally bad in 4 GB for the same tasks. If your system runs a little bit slow with 4 GB, here are ideas that are proven to work.

* Use Windows 7 instead of Windows 10.

* In Cinnamon, switch off effects.

* In your Web browser, switch on Noscript or equivalent to stop the loading of junkware.

* If you have room for a second drive, set up your system on a 128 GB SSD and use the 1 TB for your home directory. There should be lots of discarded small SSDs from all those laptops upgraded to something bigger.

* Buy some second hand ram. If your machine is 3 or more years old, there is usually cheap ram recovered from recycled machines.

All of these options can be done after you start using Linux. Setting up two disks is easier during installation. The first thing to do after starting Linux is to set up Timeshift and Backintime for backups. Backup to external disks.
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by RollyShed »

As a VivoBook 15_ASUS Laptop X540UBR is a laptop according to this -
https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/V ... k-15-X540/
I be very surprised if a second disk could be fitted into it.
If an SSD is fitted, that leaves running the original disk, if required, via a USB fitting.

Cinnamon runs OK on 2GB so as it already has 4GB there shouldn't be a problem. Yes, extra can be a good idea if...
Games might take a bit of grunt but surfing the web can be done on next to nothing.

A 240GB SSD costs $48 here so should be about $30 US.
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Termy
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by Termy »

Regarding RAM, it might give you some perspective — since SSDs were mentioned — to know that I believe the latest XBOX Series S/X consoles both have 10GB RAM, which is quite low when you consider how intensive and large games are becoming. All of this runs on an eNVME drive, which is a very fast type of solid-state storage.

With this in mind, SSDs are so blazingly fast, that it's usually fine to stick a large swapfile onto an SSD in a low-RAM machine; yes, it'll eat up writes, but these days, it's not as much a concern like it was with older SSDs, and a 128GB SSD can usually be bought for a very low price. I can get one for about £20-30, for example.
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Petermint
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by Petermint »

128 GB SSD? People are throwing them out after upgrading to something bigger. I had two, used one for a boot device, and threw the other one out as no one wanted it. (It was mSATA instead of NVMe.)

SSD reads are very fast, even on cheap SSDs. This makes the OS file cache much less important. You can squash more in memory, reducing the file cache, and still get the same speed.

Paging is different because it depends on good write speeds. Some old and some cheap SSDs have write speeds as slow as magnetic disks. If I could not expand the memory on a machine, due to the device design, I would pay extra dollars for a better SSD with a fast write speed.
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Termy
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by Termy »

Petermint wrote: Wed Jun 23, 2021 1:44 am 128 GB SSD? People are throwing them out after upgrading to something bigger. I had two, used one for a boot device, and threw the other one out as no one wanted it. (It was mSATA instead of NVMe.)
I don't see the need for huge SSDs in Linux, so I'm more than happy with 128GB. HDDs for large storage, SSDs for regular stuff; that seems to be the usual approach, at least. I have an SSD for '/root' and another for '/home', which works nicely. Here are my partitions, if you're curious:

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$ df -hx 'devtmpfs' /dev/sd*
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        11G  4.2G  6.3G  40% /
/dev/sda2       477M  104M  344M  24% /boot
/dev/sda3       9.8G  2.2G  7.2G  24% /var
/dev/sdc1        20G  7.2G   12G  39% /home
I have '/tmp' in RAM. The bulk of the data is stored on some internal and external HDDs, where speed isn't important.
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dvirberlo
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by dvirberlo »

Hi,
I am running Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon on a quite old computer (originally came with Windows Vista, do the calculations: ~10 years old), 4G ram, Intel Core 2 Duo, HDD disk {more information in my signature}.
It boots fairly fast (~2 minutes), and the day to day actions are very smooth and fast( my usage is mainly videos, web, writing code and documents).

I think this is the main concept of LinuxMint:
It includes everything you need, but keep it simple, fast and relatively light.
( I would not recommend for you Ubuntu or any GNOME-based distro. )
If your issue was solved please edit the title and add [SOLVED]. It can be very useful for others as well.
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by gugalcrom123 »

Of course. (I have looked at the specs)
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by MattJ86 »

My father has a dualcore Celeron (Bay Trail) ASUS laptop with Intel HD Graphics and 4GB RAM. It works great on Mint Cinnamon (Windows was a ball and chain) . Your specs look much better, so you can basically use any desktop environment available on Linux. But if you want to spare some resources I recommend Mate. Mate and Xfce perform basically the same on the same hardware, but in my opinion Mate looks better and with proper theming can look very modern.

Here's my customized Mate desktop on a 2008 HP550. Thanks for the awesome Mint logo
gugalcrom123 wrote: Sat Jan 08, 2022 3:13 pm
. :D
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AwesomeOpossum74
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by AwesomeOpossum74 »

The bottleneck will be RAM. But my old laptop (Duo Core 2, 4gb RAM) has Mint Cinnamon 20.2 and runs ok for web browsing and office app type stuff. I wouldn't try any heavier apps/games on it without upgrading.
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by Pjotr »

I recommend to have a look at these safe speed tweaks:
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.c ... -mint.html
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by ivar »

Charbel4 wrote: Mon Mar 29, 2021 1:48 pm RAM: 4 gb ddr4
CPU: Intel Core i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz (Quad Core, each core with the speed of 800 mhz)
HDD: 1TB ST1000LM035-1RK1
I run 20-3 cinnamon smoothly on a laptop with 4 GB, intel i5-4210 - ie 4 generations older than the 8250U. Your cores should run at more than 800MHz at full speed
But, SSD in mine , I suspect it would have been less than ideal to run a rotating disk
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by Petermint »

Try finding useful specifications for a notebook. The internals vary so much from country to country. Different factories. Different products in the same plastic case.

Some of the X540 series have a DVD player you can replace with a disk which means you can move the 1TB to the DVD slot and put an SSD in the disk slot.

Some have 4 GB RAM soldered in and a slot for up to 8 GB more. As I mentioned earlier, 4 GB is fine if not editing big scans or video or playing a big game. DOOM 2 is the ultimate game and runs in 2 GB. Why would you play anything else? :D

Complaints about 4 GB are usually from users of Chrome after they open 768 Web pages. :shock:

You can run a good speed test from a USB stick if the USB stick is fast, something like a Sandisk Extreme. They are as fast or faster than old magnetic disks. An Extreme Pro is closer to what you would get from an SSD upgrade. :idea:
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by JerryF »

Petermint wrote: Thu Apr 15, 2021 8:28 pm ...
* Use Windows 7 instead of Windows 10.
...
Why would you recommend an OS that is no longer supported?
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Re: would mint run smoothly

Post by diabolicbg »

JerryF wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 7:20 pm
Petermint wrote: Thu Apr 15, 2021 8:28 pm ...
* Use Windows 7 instead of Windows 10.
...
Why would you recommend an OS that is no longer supported?
Because I ran for 12 years on Windows 7 x64 without reinstalling and with updates turned off, and never had problems. :P
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