best Mint flavor for my rig

[qett]

hi all, i have been using mint for years and love it. i was a unity refugee originally. I am a medium user but know how to do stuff for sure.

So I always just used cinnamon, but on my laptop that I just retired I found it to be slow (probably hardware tbh). So, I went with Mate 17.2 or 17.3, whichever is the latest, been running it for a month or so, 5 weeks maybe.

Anyway you might guess I am not completely happy. I do like the relatively lightness of Mate, but I am having a lot of slowdowns. Actually I like the simplicity of Mate a lot, its a refreshing change, but there are issues.

My rig is basically MSI 270 gamer pro, 8 gigs memory, i5-6600 intel cpu, and only on-board graphics card (because i want to mine on the rig but also use it daily, and only use on-board for daily use, dedicate gpus to mining).

Anyway deluge is destroying my experience, along with Chromium and a few other programs like skype. Overall things are peppy but i get slowdowns terribly. Nothing too horrible, but just non-responsive windows, trying and failing to open the home folder..and so on.

So, my question is, what's going on? Should I stick with Mate but maybe go back to 17.0 to avoid the bugs? Or stick with the new one through the bugs by dumping deluge? Or another flavor of Mint?
cinnamon maybe?

[Superannuated]

Have you applied the tips for how to speed up Mint at Pjotr' web site?
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/3

Poke around his home page, there are other suggestions.

[jimallyn]

I had to look up Deluge to see what it is. There are other bittorrent clients available. I use Qbittorrent, on the rare occasions that I deal with torrents at all. There is a newer version of Deluge available here:

https://launchpad.net/~deluge-team/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

I haven't noticed 17.3 being buggy at all. I use 17.3 Cinnamon on my desktop, and 17.3 XFCE on my old laptop. Both work fine.

Mint's XFCE version will save you a little bit of RAM and CPU over MATE.

It might also be worthwhile to check out the latest Mint version, 18.3.

[kc1di]

Mate is a great desktop and I use it every day. and your machine should have no problems with it.
Xfce may be a bit lighter on resources but with 8 gbs ram and your cpu it should not be that much difference.
There are several torrent clients available in the repositories do a search for them in synaptic.
I use transmission which I believe is default in 18.3 (Which by the way you may want to try.)

as for chromium - I use opera it's fast and responsive only use google-chrome occasionally when I need to cast something. but still chromium should not be the cause of your slowdowns.

Check the driver manager tool in the control panel and make sure you have the best driver for your video card. If your using an nvidia card it's likely your need to update the driver. good luck.

To answer your original question which version of Mint? With your equipment any version of 18.3 should work fine.
17.x is not right for you equipment.

[michael louwe]

@ qett, .......

...

You have an Intel 6th-gen Skylake processor which is more compatible with LM 18.x, and not the 2014-released LM 17.x, ie you should be running Linux kernel 4.4 or higher.

[qett]

Ok thanks to all, appreciate the response.

Its good to know my system should be able to handle Mate 18.2 ok. Sorry for the mistake in numbers, its definitely 18.2. I choose the parts myself and thought I had screwed up.

I will do the tweaking and use Qtorrrent, hopefully its just deluge doing something funky. It just seems so heavy and resource intensive.

I am used to chromium being a memory hog, on my laptop I noticed that before, and my laptop has 16 gigs of memory!

really I didn't notice anything else being a huge problem other than skype calls, but video calls are obviously not basic services, plus I dont expect too much from skype anymore. even virtualbox is handled smoothly!

Thanks again!!