Help me pic a version of linux that is beginner friendly and will meet my system requirements.

[Shredded_Wheat64]

I've run Linux before (Mint/Ubuntu) for short periods of time but consider myself a beginner. I have an 11+ yr old laptop that came with Win 7 and it ran 8.1 fine. Looking to still use to save electricity. Laptop is an ACER with a quad core cpu @1.6, 2 gig dedicated gpu 7670m (little less than a ATI 9700...showing my age), 8 gigs ram, 500gig 5400rpm HD. Want something that will be quick but not too old either. Not sure how Mint would do on those specs?

 

[Zepp]

The common distros/desktop environments do fine with 8GB RAM so you shouldn't have trouble running any of them.
So revisiting Mint or Ubuntu would be a great option for that laptop.

What CPU is it exactly?

 

[WelshBloke]

Mint should be fine, there's a 'light' version as well (XFCE) if you are worried about your hardware performance.

 

[crashtech]

As WelshBloke says, the XFCE version is indicated for older hardware, and what I would recommend.

Linux Mint 22.1 "Xia" - Linux Mint

Linux Mint is an elegant, easy to use, up to date and comfortable desktop operating system.

linuxmint.com

 

[manly]

As an aside, you desperately want to put an SSD into that laptop.
Small/cheap ones are still sold on Amazon. Should be plenty of used ones on eBay as well.

 

[Shredded_Wheat64]

As an aside, you desperately want to put an SSD into that laptop.
Small/cheap ones are still sold on Amazon. Should be plenty of used ones on eBay as well.

Thanks, I tried to put an older 240gig SSD in it and no matter what the bios wouldn't recognize it, the 500 gig HD is new got it for like $11 on Amazon.

 

[Shredded_Wheat64]

Thanks for the suggestions...think I will try Mint with XFCE.

 

[lxskllr]

Plasma is pretty light these days and worth a look. I use xfce and plasma on my home/work machines, They're both mid 2010s I5 dell workstations, so old, but decent specs for a general purpose desktop. I feel no difference between them performance wise. Ram consumption is similar. I like both desktops, and I like having a foot in both gtk and qt, but sometimes I think I might want to switch my home machine to plasma. I never think I want to switch my work machine to xfce.

edit:
as an old sidenote... Around 2020 I installed lubuntu on my boss' c2d desktop, but the performance was pretty bad, especially for the features that were cut. It's supposed to be light, and it uses the lxqt environment. I then wiped it, and put kubuntu on it, and the performance was much better. It's an old data point, and wasn't thoroughly researched at the time, but it's worth noting.

Point is, old dogma sometimes doesn't hold up to time, and it's worth revisiting technology to see how it behaves on *your* specific hardware. Pick something you'd actually like to use, and see if it works well for you.

If I wanted to save every scrap of resources, I'd use a simple window manager instead of a full desktop. and trim everything out that isn't a feature I use. "Features" are "bloat". "Bloat" is "features". Semantics...

 

[Red Squirrel]

Linux From Scratch. J/K.

Mint is really good. I use it myself as my daily driver. I use the Cinnamon version. Try them all to see which you like best. They have a live desktop environment that you can boot into so you can play with it before you commit to install.