Thinkpads Forum

Hey,

Could someone of You share experience and suggest a linux distro for newbie with unix.
I will run linux on x61s with 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM and SSD drive. PC will be used at home for browsing, videos and email.

Thanks!

Greetings,

Linux is all about choice, and choosing what you like best. Here is just one of many articles about choosing: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-cho ... nux-distro

Best thing to do is download several distributions that look appealing, and test them "Live" before you install. That way you will get a feel for how they look, and if they are compatible with your hardware and work habits. The journey is lots of fun too!

Selected linux mint. Testing it now

Check out PuppyLinux; it runs great on older hardware and has a very small file size. I found Mint to be somewhat boated for my needs-
Mark S.

Puppy linux is good, but the limited range of apps can be a downside. Linux mint is a great distro, but the desktop manager is a bit heavy for x61s hardware. You can install and configure a lightweight window manager such as openbox or jwm to speed up things quite a bit.

I started with Ubuntu and hopped along the way on different distributions like PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Ultimate and OpenSUSE.

My fav. was Ubuntu, however when that became bloated and they started recording your seaches in your personal files I switched to Linux Mint. Never looked back.

Linux Mint 17.1 64-Bit MATE is great for beginners. It offers all the codecs etc you need and works out of the box.

Go for Linux Mint with Xfce desktop environment. Should have all you need, look decent and be fast on that hardware.

Archbang aka Arch with Openbox WM.

I had Xubuntu a few years back on my X61s, worked well until I changed the WiFi card... I couldn't figure out the drivers for it.

kony wrote:Go for Linux Mint with Xfce desktop environment. Should have all you need, look decent and be fast on that hardware.

I was trying the different flavors of Linux Mint on my X61 with T7100 and 3GB of RAM, and I really don't like Xfce. I was drawn to its minimalism and supposedly increased speed on older hardware. The fact that the system requirements are not any less for the Xfce edition should give a clue as to it usefulness in that regard. The X61 has zero problems running Cinnamon. Xfce feels like you lose a lot of customizability and eye candy with nothing in return. With Xfce I also had to use a lot of Google-fu to solve lots of little niggles I ran into.

Qing Dao wrote: The fact that the system requirements are not any less for the Xfce edition should give a clue as to it usefulness in that regard. The X61 has zero problems running Cinnamon. Xfce feels like you lose a lot of customizability and eye candy with nothing in return. With Xfce I also had to use a lot of Google-fu to solve lots of little niggles I ran into.

If you want a lightweight XFCE then avoid any version of Mint, it's raison d'etre is to be GNOME2'ish in a windows sorta way with bells n whistles added almost ready for a XP refugee.

Get Arch or Debian and put XFCE on top and it's a nice neat solution for a X61S.

When I had my x61, I was running Debian w/ various window managers. Ran flawlessly.

The new Ubuntu Mate release is looking very nice and should run fine with a legacy CPU

Nepyk wrote:Hey,

Could someone of You share experience and suggest a linux distro for newbie with unix.
I will run linux on x61s with 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM and SSD drive. PC will be used at home for browsing, videos and email.

Thanks!

Mint 17.1 cinnamon was perfect for me
same conf of you either 1.4Ghz cpu

I find that Debian LXDE is light and easy to customize. I run it -- customized to look like a Gnome 2 desktop -- on my 390X (P3), Satellite 2410 (P4), and R500 (Core2Duo).

I'd also recommend, regardless of which distribution you choose, that you look up xbindkeys and xbindkeys-config. They're great little programs that let you assign functions to specialized keys (like volume, mute, etc). This is pretty handy if those keys don't work out of the box, and you can't find any other way to make them work.

Linux Mint 17.1 64-Bit MATE is great for beginners. It offers all the codecs etc you need and works out of the box.

Linux Mint 17.1 Mate (Rebecca) is great, just don't try to install any of the higher numbered updates (which are not selected by default) without backing your machine up first. It seems to be a bit sensitive to those; perhaps the situation will improve when Ubuntu 16.04 LTS appears.

I tried new Fedora with KDE and it runs pretty smoothly and nice on ThinkPad T43 with ATI GPU. I would say that this Qt-based environment runs much more better on my ThinkPad than GTK3-based environments (ie. Fedora GNOME, Ubuntu etc.).

lukee wrote:I tried new Fedora with KDE and it runs pretty smoothly and nice on ThinkPad T43 with ATI GPU. I would say that this Qt-based environment runs much more better on my ThinkPad than GTK3-based environments (ie. Fedora GNOME, Ubuntu etc.).

KDE5 Plasma full on?

Yup.

Impressed, that's about as heavy a DE as it gets. Not bad for that age.