[System] KDE Plasma 5 on a weak laptop

[MarcCDB]

Hey guys
So, my mom is saying her laptop feels very slow and I'm thinking about ditching her Windows 10 setup for a Linux distro...
The laptop config is: Celeron N3160 - quad-core, 4 Gigs of RAM, SSD of 120Gb... so it's modest... perfect for internet-only use...

Now the real question is... can I install either Kubuntu 18.04 or KDE Neon in that laptop and still have a nice performance? I'm thinking more about the weak integrated GPU... an Intel HD... I know KDE Plamta can handle RAM very well and 4GB is enough...

If so, what can I do to lighten a bit the load on the GPU? Any tips on things I should turn off?

I chose KDE because I believe it's more visually appealing and lighter than Gnome... XFCE and MATE were also considered, but they are both uglier and I want to maintain that old Windows 10 feel...

Thanks for the help.

[oshunluvr]

I'm running Kubuntu 18.04 on an i3 4010U w/Intel 4400 video chipset, which ranks very closely to the N3160 Celeron but I'm using 8 gigs ram. It runs great.

KDEneon is stripped down install so lighter weight at the start but 18.04 isn't out yet. There are enough advantages to the Kubuntu 18.04 release that I'd recommend that over KDEneon 16.04. Besides, mom isn't going to care if she gets KDE updates sooner which is the main reason to use KDEneon.

Your Celeron has a newer video chipset (Intel 5300) but I doubt mom will be running any heavy duty games so I think it'll be just fine out of the box. Just be sure you're using the Intel driver and not a generic one like VESA.

The only issue might be open browser tabs and only 4GB of RAM. If mom uses chrome and leave 20-30 tabs open she may see some slow-down.

[claydoh]

I run KDE Neon on a Chromebook with the same cpu and ram. It runs fine, even multiple tabs in Chrome - being quad core helps here. I mostly only notice the lack of oomph when updating, as that part can be really slow with the disk writes/reads, but that is due to fact that I am running it on a super fast usb3 stick at the moment. Not anywhere near as fast as the machine's emmc drive, which in turn is slower than many SSD drives. It is hard for me to tell the difference between my i5 laptop and the Chromebook when I am doing normal web stuff.

For internet uses, as well as Libreoffice and the like, your system is fine, and will definitely zippier than Windows.
As Oshunluver mentioned, Neon is pretty stripped down, so it starts off very lightweight - similar to Xfce, actually. A full Kubuntu will be a bit more resourcer hungry, but there is the Minimal install option, which pares that down nearly to Neon's level. Neon and the Minimal install do not come with Kontact/Kmail and the associated Akonadi, which I think saves a lot of the resources, which most internet based users do not need anyway.


The only thing I would be concerned over is sound support, but that depends on the model. These Celeron/Atom based laptops are architecturally very similar to chromebooks, and sound support on those can be lacking sometimes, especially on 16.04 based distros such as Neon. If you try the livecd of Kubuntu or Neon, the first thing I would check is the sound

[MarcCDB]

Thank you both! I'll give Kubuntu a try... now the actual challenge will be changing mom's mind about Windows and "teaching" the new ways in Linux. =)

Thanks again