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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Hey, it's this meme again!
This seems as good a place as any to ask. I have a shitty old laptop that ran Arch pretty good, but I'm not good enough at Linux and I managed to fuck it up. Something about the root partition being full, and discussions about the fix went over my head. So I pulled all my stuff off of it and installed Mint like my other computer has, because it's braindead easy to use. But even Mint Xfce runs like doo doo on this machine.
Is there any good middle ground that's more beginner friendly than Arch, and runs on weaker machines than Mint?
Is it actually your drive slowing you down? Do you have a hard drive or SSD? You could run ReadSpeed to see the speed at different segment of your drive. If it's slow across the whole thing, that's probably why it's so sluggish. If it's just the beginning and end of the drive on an SSD, you might be able fix it.
Lubuntu is a smaller install and will run well on a toaster. It is made for older computers. When no os runs well chose Lubuntu.
Or Xubuntu!
But honestly Mint is the way to go for new guys.
Let's build it out even further. Linux Mint Debian Edition with XFCE.
True. Any Ubuntu spin offs would work as they have more support for newbies to help get things working.
You could try basic Debian, maybe with lxqt?
I never see the point of Debian derivatives anyway.
Or maybe try out one with a lightweight wm like fluxbox or icewm. These are more barebones i think. last time i used fluxbox many years ago it did everything i needed and was pretty cool.
maybe . . . MX linux " the most popular linux distro" /s Except i think they ban systemd.init so lots of debian based help wont necessarily work.
Meh - maybe none of these are good answers to your question.
Just plain Debian, with either xfce or i3. I have a rediculusly old laptop that runs them both fine. I generally prefer i3 on it because the touchpad is pretty terrible, but xfce works well with a real mouse.
Debian won, I'm trying it first. So far so good, using KDE because Arch ran pretty well with it, but will likely try i3 if this gets slow. Side note: This is the first distro I've tried that shows accurate colors on my laptop! I'd resigned myself to always having a slightly washed out, slightly cool color palette. Not anymore! It looks normal!
If you decide to give i3 a try, I recommend this repo as a sane starting config: https://github.com/shreyas-a-s/debian-i3
Void should be fine if you've used arch before. You'll likely have an awkward moment when you go into xfce and there's no audio playing with your music/video, but you can get it working by linking pipewire's folder under /etc/sv into /var/service. There're other ways too
Maybe try EndeavourOS.
It's pre-configured Arch, since you said it ran Arch well.
I'm going to get obliterated in the distro wars for recommending a Manjaro derivative, but how about Mabox? It's more of a ricing distro, but it's also the most beginner friendly distro I can think of that doesn't use one of the heavier desktop environments but still keeps the floating window paradigm as the path of least resistance. I think you'd be fine, just use the AUR sparingly. https://maboxlinux.org/
Linux from scratch